We all have busy days with hands full of managing daily tasks of our business. Sometimes posting on Twitter or Facebook is the last thing on our mind. Social Media Marketing is one area that you should be careful of taking too many shortcuts with.
There are many tools you can use to automate almost all social media tasks that can help you maintain your social media presence, but this is not recommended for all tasks. Using social media automation is important, though, producing personal content will generate better results rather than using auto-replies or anything that is not human.
If you are active on more than one social network, you probably won’t be able to do everything by yourself and you will need a lot of time to make personal posts, write comments and engage with your followers, so maybe you should consider using a tool for some tasks but not all.
Here are 7 Social Media Marketing Shortcuts To Avoid:
1. Automatic one-on-one Communication
Yes, you probably don’t have time to reply to all of your customers messages and you feel that offering some type of automated reply is better than nothing. But, automated replays do have the potential to do some damage to your brand’s image, especially if you are trying to position yourself as a personable brand.
2. Buying Fake Followers & Fake Likes
Buying fake followers or likes is a waste of money. It’s not a problem to go to Fiverr and buy followers or likes for 5$. But those fake accounts won’t engage with your content, and they’ll eventually be deleted by Twitter anyway. Organically grow your fans and followers, that way you won’t have a devastating effect on your Facebook organic reach and you’ll truly experience the influence social media marketing can have on your business.
3. Only Retweeting Twitter Strategy
Retweeting other people messages could be great for networking and promoting someone else’s content. But, strictly retweeting shows your audience that you don’t have anything original or unique to offer. Otherwise, why should someone follow you when they can get the message from the source? Avoid doing it if you’re only doing it to promote your customer testimonials, it barely qualifies as engagement.
4. Pre-Schedule For Real-Time Events
There are many advantages in scheduling content in advance, though, scheduling content for real-time events puts you at risk for having content that is completely out of context.
For instance, you may not want to share random, unrelated political articles during a major presidential debate.
5. Inviting Everyone To Like Your Fan Page
Targeting your audience is significant. You don’t want just anyone of your friends to like your fan page, unless they are in your target market. Engaging with your real audience allows you to be more targeted and understand your community. It’s very important to be reaching the right people on Facebook, you want to make sure you are reaching the right audience for your brand each time you create an ad campaign that targets fans of your page.
6. Creating Fake Profiles
You wouldn’t believe this, but it does happen. Fake profiles won’t do what you think they will. Creating fake profiles won’t increase engagement and probably your followers will quickly figure this out. Be creative and create quality content that naturally gets your audience engaged.
7. Post Your Messages automatically Across Multiple Networks
Your audience on Facebook is not the same audience you have on Twitter, that’s why you should have two different strategies for how you engage and interact with your audience. For instance the amount of tweets you should post on Twitter are not the same for Facebook. Avoid pushing the same content onto both social media sites.
To conclude, it’s human nature to look for time-saving solutions to conquer our everyday tasks, but try not to be lazy, shortcuts might cause a negative impact on your business and eventually taking the “social” out of your social media marketing.