From Agorapulse:
Social media marketing is never done: It is a continuous process that requires constant attention and effort.
There are also no set rules as to what should be done to achieve certain results.
There are things you can certainly do wrong though, even if you think you are an experienced social media manager.
Here are five mistakes even experienced social media managers do (I certainly did all of those!) and how to fix them.
1. Not Scheduling Social Media Updates
I know, for some social media managers reading this, scheduling is an integral part of their workflow.
How can someone achieve a consistent social media presence without creating a well-balanced schedule of social media updates?
The truth is lots of brand-owned social media profiles don’t really have a consistent schedule. Many social media managers fail to create a schedule regularly. (Yikes.)
Scheduling is not that easy to manage if you’re always in a rush or don’t have a strategy.
I’ve been there many times … You schedule creative social media updates weeks ahead and then overlook the day when your schedule has been exhausted. Time flies and a few weeks or even a month may pass before you realize you should have filled your schedule up with fresh updates.
To overcome this struggle, I’ve been using these two tricks:
Create a social content schedule for the following year
I tend to use a slower period for scheduling. This is when I sit down and schedule 1-2 updates a month for as far a year ahead. Usually, these are weekend updates or posts timed for a holiday or a seasonal trend (back-to-school, Black Friday, etc.) This way, I make sure I will not miss any.
. . . .
Set up a routine
Always schedule monthly updates on a specific day.
For example, always on the last Friday of the previous month or always on the 28th of each month. Doing so will help you to keep yourself accountable.
I also create a recurring calendar reminder to never miss the day.
. . . .
2. Cross-Posting the Same Updates Everywhere
As social media managers, we always have to manage more than one channel. At the bare minimum, your active social media profiles to manage to include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
It is always tempting to create the same update and cross-post it everywhere.
Doing so will, unfortunately, create a few missed opportunities by making your updates less appealing (and hence easier to miss).
There are platforms that support mostly vertical images, and there are platforms that prefer square images. There are channels that tend to respond better to animated GIFs and / or micro-videos, and there are platforms that hardly support them.
I could go on …
Creating an original, well-crafted (visual) update for each of your channels is not only more effective but also very doable. For example, there are image creation solutions that allow you to resize your images with one click of a mouse (such as Snappa) and there are tools that let you create animated GIFs in minutes (like Bannersnack):
Link to the rest at Agorapulse
PG fails to check any boxes as either a social media pretend-expert or a more than a mini-social media user.
In the earliest existence of TPV, PG had a couple of WordPress plug-ins that automatically spit out a short blurb with hash tags on a couple of TPV social media accounts that PG seldom monitored. PG seems to recall that each of the plugins wanted some money to keep doing what they had been doing at no charge and he hadn’t seen any real benefit from the social media world, so he uninstalled them.
One of the fundamental principles of any sort of advertising or promotion activity is to know your audience, which includes knowing what the audience watches, listens to, clicks on, etc., etc.
While TPV is anything but a finely-crafted piece of self-promotion for whatever he’s selling these days, PG thinks he has a pretty good feel for the people who stop buy to check out what’s going on around here. He watches comments and, on occasion, traffic stats for the site and it’s doing what he thinks he wants it to do, at least today.
If PG woke up one morning and decided he wanted to be a social media star, he would probably ask a neighbor who teaches social media marketing at a local university to identify his smartest student, then hire that student on a part-time basis to help set up PG’s social media empire, launch it, then watch what the student did with social media on PG’s behalf for a few months to learn the ropes.
During PG’s online wanderings, he has read a zillion articles about how to be successful in social media, but he senses that he’s not feeling the rhythms necessary to really do it well.
If he were purely pragmatic, PG might conclude that he’s doing fine without social media and focus on the things he knows how to do and knows will work for him, but he has a soft spot for new gadgets (he can see several by just glancing at the far reaches of his large, wrap-around desk), so he still monitors bright objects like social media.