Everyone has a bad habit or two, and you are likely aware of what yours are. While setting out to stop biting your nails or eating cookies before bed is worthwhile, are you paying as much attention to your social media bad habits? Those bad habits are much harder to recognize, but are absolutely making your social channels suffer.
No matter how long you’ve been in social media, you’ve likely picked up a bad habit or two. For those people that have been managing social media channels for years, the habits are even more ingrained, and have likely been dragging their channels down for nearly as long. It’s time to look at your bad habits, and set out to break them.
Celebrating Vanity Metrics
This is the top bad habit that almost everyone falls into. Followers and engagement are easy to measure, and they look impressive on the surface. The chase for a viral tweet is in the back of every social media managers mind. Holding up a Twitter post with over a hundred thousand likes looks amazing! But did it help your business?
There is a correlation between how much time consumers spend with brands online and their future purchasing, but those huge posts aren’t the key to that. It’s about your long term engagement and interactions. Your follower count might be massive, but if those followers aren’t becoming customers, they aren’t valuable. Make sure you know what metrics actually matter to your brand, and stop chasing a simple number.
Misreading Analytics
Not everyone is a numbers person. As social media grows, so do the analytic tools we use. Looking at the pages of numbers and charts can get overwhelming, and make you feel even more confused than when you started. However, it cannot be overstated how important it is to find the right analytics, and then stay on top of them.
Instead of just posting daily and hoping for the best, you should be analyzing your posts to find out what worked, and what didn’t. As stated above, it can be easy to look at likes or comments and think those are your valuable posts, but it’s vital you look at how many people clicked your links, where they went on your website, how much time they spent on it, what products they looked at.
Sometimes numbers will drop dramatically, particularly Organic Reach on Facebook, but your engagements or website visits might be up. It’s important to know which metrics show you how social media algorithms treated your content, and how your audience did. Make sure you’re asking the right questions instead of counting on green arrows to tell you the story.
Failing To Tell A Story
Social media is the absolute best way to tell the story of who you are. You can post great content, gain followers, and get a viral tweet or two, but if you aren’t telling YOUR story, you can’t expect anyone to listen or connect.
Storytelling isn’t about a single post or blog, it’s about how you use your channels to provide snackable and easily understood content that encapsulates who you are. Show off what you do, set the style for your brand, establish your messaging, and be honest with consumers.
Telling your story is a long term plan, and too often brands lose track of what it is they are trying to express and default back to content they think is splashy and will get responses. If you feel your audience is losing sight of your story, take the time to reevaluate your strategy, and pull them back in.
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