Here we take a look at four social media mistakes you should avoid in the New Year.
1. Not tracking your links
One of the best ways to track the value of your social media posts (what’s bringing in the most traffic), is by tracking your links. Many companies are only tracking what social media channel supplies their website with clicks, rather than the individual posts. You could try Google Analytics URL Builder. This will let you see how much traffic comes from each specific post, the average session duration, average pages views per session and bounce rate. You can better analyse the success of your posts – it will enable you to determine what types of posts work and what subjects are most popular.
2. Automatically posting to Facebook and Twitter
Admittedly it does save time, but it’s not the best for the followers of your channels. With the rise of tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer, it shouldn’t be happening. Typically your audiences will differ on each social media channel, so they require modified messages. Also, because the formats of posting are different (image sizes, character limits etc.), you should be tailoring your posts anyway. If you schedule a tweet that’s missing an image and half of the content is cut off, it just doesn’t look professional.
3. Talking at your customers, not engaging with them
Believing that your social media channels are a way to spam your advertising messages should be forgotten about when entering 2016. Instead of only posting about your brand, try to engage your followers instead. Ask questions, reply to comments and proactively engage on other channels. Engaging your customers can really propel your social media channels to success.
4. Depending on organic reach
Unfortunately your brand’s social media posts won’t get seen by all of your followers without putting some investment behind them. This is especially important on Facebook, as companies tend to see a very small reach without putting some money behind posts. If you spend a lot of time curating content for a post, it might be worth spending a little money to increase its reach. So in 2016, you may want to set aside a small budget for social media posts every month to reach a larger audience.
Read and comment on the original Forbes article.