In this day and age where convenience is the name of the game, staying rigid and not moving with the trends can leave your brand irrelevant and ultimately obsolete. It is the job of the modern-day marketer specifically, the social media manager to move with the times and understand what is selling and what is not. Social media has been the fastest-growing channel used for advertising as it is inexpensive and efficient.
Social media managers are essentially are the main drivers of your communications on any social media platform. Without them communicating efficiently and accurately to your audience can turn disastrous.
As of 2020, the social media industry worldwide is valued at over 3.6 billion USD. This is a very big pie and if your brand is not jumping up for the opportunity, it is missing out. Joining the social media sphere as a brand can be tricky. Brands are joining social media, however, struggle to see any improvement in their normal day-to-day. This is usually frustrating to a person who is not properly trained and does not actually understand what social media is all about.
Learn more: Brands on social media
We are going to explore the 5 main reasons that could be hindering your brands’ success on social media.
Relevancy
We have almost been told by every marketing 101 blogs, newsletters even gurus that to be successful and break through the noise, you need to stay relevant. This statement still holds true to this day. In this digital age, people have grown accustomed to the instant-offering model. This means if a customer is looking to buy a new smartphone, the can simply do it at the comfort of their own couch. This concept has left brands that have not been moving with the trends to lose their engagement rates and ultimately their followers’ attention. Staying relevant does not only mean being part of the trend, but it also means speaking your audiences’ language.
Reluctance to change/Inflexibility
Change can be daunting. In the past 6 months, Covid-19 forced every business to change. Those that changed stayed afloat and thrive, those that were reluctant to change went obsolete. This is true with social media. Posts that are shared online usually do not gain any traction due to the reluctance to change and relevancy. This means that brands that were not willing to change their messaging to better communicate with their audience ultimately lost the audience. We all know that if someone is constantly sharing information with us that does not resonate with us, someone loses interest.
Post links
Post links can be described as any link that is attached to the content that you share. Usually, these links are merged with the content to encourage users to go to a specific landing page and interact with the page. From a brands perspective, this sounds like the obvious choice. This statement could not be more wrong.
Social media platforms are businesses as you are a business, and the motivation to keep offering you their services for free is money. If money is the motivation, this means that social media platforms choose to serve content to users they think are most likely to find the content relevant. This goes back to relevancy.
Social media platforms make most of their money through advertisements. This suggests that one of their main objectives could be to convince you to advertise your business on their platforms. With this in mind. If a social media post has a link attached to it, this suggests that you are trying to suede people to leave their platform to your landing page. This is particularly bad for the social media platform as when you take their users of the platform there are fewer and fewer people that see ads that another brand is running at the time. This forces the platform itself to use algorithms that limit the number of people that can see your post at a given time. This is why pages can have a large number of followers yet less than 5% of the followers are served the post.
Learn more: Benefits of social media
In-image text
The most common error brands make with their creatives is to include as much information into one creative in efforts to inform their customers of what they offer. This can cost your posts shared reach, impressions and engagements.
In-image texts should be used as a way of catching a customer’s attention instead of sharing your service offerings.
Engagements
Engagements surely cannot have anything to do with your reach and impressions, do they? Well, they have everything to do with your reach and impressions. Your engagements come from the users that actually see your content.
Impressions simply are how many times an ad/post was shown to a user/screen e.g. user logs in on Facebook and sees an ad/post on a phone, that is one impression while reach means how many people saw the ad/post e.g. two people log in on Facebook and sees your ad/post, that is a reach of two
Social media platforms usually use this information to determine who must be shown your post at a given time. This is because the social media platforms want their users to see content that is relevant and of value, to them so they stay longer and get served more ads.
In conclusion, the few misconceptions and errors about social media should not be a stumbling block for your brand to thrive on social media. Working together with the system by better optimising your content, using as little as possible of in-image texts, minimal post links and improving your engagements can ensure that you stay ahead of your competition, accelerating your brand into success.
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