Social media is an essential part of any business’s marketing strategy. It’s a free place to post content that draws attention to your business and brand and gives you a close link to potential customers. However, not all social media content is created equal. Some businesses make mistakes with their content that cost them both followers and customers. Knowing what mistakes to avoid, though, can help you to keep your followers engaged and customers happy.
How Many Social Media Posts Should You Make?
One mistake that businesses make is posting too much content on social media. Say you’ve got a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast, and plenty of photographs from an event that your company hosted. That’s a lot of great content you could share on your social media accounts with your followers! Not all of that content needs to be shared on social media, especially not all at once, however.
Too much content actually alienates your followers and many will unfollow you in order to escape the barrage of your social media posts on their feeds. It may take some time to learn exactly what frequency of posts works best for your users, but it’s worth it. Your social media strategy can focus on the quality of your posts rather than sheer quantity.
Should Your Social Media Content Differ Across Platforms?
Another mistake that some businesses make is posting the same content on all of their social media accounts. While that’s easy to do and means that you only have to put together one social media post and all of your channels are covered, it’s not the best way to engage with users. Every social media platform is set up differently and that means that users on each have different expectations. This holds true even if some of the users are the same across platforms.
You can use the same content as the base for your social media posts, but it should be adjusted for each social media platform. For example, Instagram is great for photos and videos but not as much for links to blog posts, while Facebook can do all three. Additionally, hashtags are vital to reaching your audience on Instagram but on Facebook, they’re not as important. You’ll want to make sure your posts are optimized for each social media platform so you can reach the largest number of people.
Should You Share Only Your Own Content?
While it is important to share your own content with your audience, you should also mix it up a bit. Share links to other websites and most importantly, share user-generated content. That will help to increase your engagement.
Should You Upload Videos Directly to Social Media Platforms?
Sharing a link to a YouTube video is the easiest way to get your video content onto social media. However, it’s not the best way. If a social media platform allows you to upload videos directly to that platform, as Facebook does, you should do that. For example, Facebook videos get much more engagement than links to YouTube videos.