7 Mistakes To Avoid When Taking Your Brand Social

Thinking about taking your brand social? There are a lot of benefits to be gained, but if you make any of these common mistakes, your social media marketing efforts could do more harm than good.
Here are 7 social media screw ups to avoid.

1. Not interacting with others — Engagement is essential for social media success. You have to interact with others if you want to make a splash with social media marketing. That means taking the time to respond when people talk to you, being insightful in your comments, and trying to build relationships with your audience.

2. Not being authentic — Social media demands that you be more authentic and transparent. It’s about connecting with customers on a more personal level, so that you aren’t just some big, faceless corporation to them. That’s one of the reasons I’m against ghost tweeting. Having a social media “professional” Tweet under your company’s name is like lying to everyone.

3. Treating social media like a traditional advertisement — Social media is a conversation. Conversations require both people talk. That means you can just start blasting one-way advertisements at everyone. You have to tone it down several notches and instead focus on adding value to the conversation.

4. Being unable to handle criticism — Whether you’re starting a blog or getting on Twitter, you’re going to run into people who have negative things to say about you and your company. It’s one of the great things about social media. It puts everyone on a level playing field. Consumers get to say what they want. If you don’t have thick skin, this can be a problem. You’ll respond unprofessionally, and just make everything worse than it already is.

5. Diving in without getting a feel for the field — The “bull in the china shop” approach never works with social media. You can’t just sign up for a new community (whether it’s Twitter, Digg, or whatever else), and immediately expect to be a top influencers. Every community works differently, and each has its own set of unwritten rules. That’s why you have to spend time studying the network you’re going to join before you start taking part in the conversation.

6. Careening toward social media burnout — Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. An exec comes into the office, announcing he wants to socialize the brand. He signs up on Twitter, Tweets at a feverish pace for a couple of weeks, gets frustrated with a lack of progress/results, and quits, deeming social media to be nothing more than a fad. To be successful, you need to really do your homework, and you need to stay committed to it for the long haul.

7. Disappearing. Reappearing. Disappearing again — Imagine you started dating someone, but you only got to see them in brief spurts every few days and sometimes every few weeks. It’d be pretty hard to build a relationship don’t you think? The same concept applies to social media marketing. You can’t show up, then disappear for a stretch of time, and show up again, expecting people to pay attention to you.