7 bad habits to break now in your social media marketing

Written By Megan Van Groll

With our daily lives still largely on hold, many of us are embracing this opportunity to pause, reflect, and reconsider a lot about the way we used to do, well, everything.

In many ways, this global interruption feels like a fresh start.

Personally, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can improve the way I serve my clients - from new tools and tech to streamline our work, to new strategies to get them better results.

I also feel grateful for the time and space to implement these changes, because it’ll be so much easier to tackle that now than even a few months ago.

As marketers and business owners, this is also an opportunity to rethink how we use social media to connect with our customers.

Maybe you’ve sensed for a while that your social strategy needed to change, but you didn’t know how. Or, momentum and inertia kept you in place.

It’s easy to cling to old strategies and habits simply because they used to work, and they’re comfortable.

But with social media, you can’t phone it in and expect to still make an impact. It’s too noisy and crowded, and it changes too often.

Though timeless principles of marketing always apply to social media, what worked tactically even a few months ago might not work today.

So as you take a fresh look at your marketing strategy, ask whether you (or your team) are being held back by any of these common social media mistakes:

1. Over-using stock photography on Instagram.

Stock has come a long way from the cheeseball images we associate with the term — I’m personally a fan of Unsplash for their artistic, candid photos.

But Instagram’s mission (ergo, its algorithm’s mission) is to “bring you closer to the people and things you love.”

You can’t really do that with someone else’s images.

And though a witty, interesting, or helpful caption is nice, it won’t be enough to carry your post if the photo falls flat. Instagram is a visual platform, after all.

Meanwhile, aesthetic tastes are shifting away from perfection, while smartphone cameras are getting sharper.

I’ve noticed this with my own clients. All of their best-performing Instagram posts are photos they took with smartphones or hired a photographer to take — not the highly curated stock images that performed almost equally as well even just a few months ago.

Stock photos have a place in your marketing. I’m not knocking them. But if you’re using them too often on Instagram and seeing engagement dip, it’s time to rethink your visual approach to the platform.

Can you start using your own brand photos more frequently, even if they’re not professional-quality?

Can you use your photos to take us behind the scenes, even right now?

2. Spreading your brand thin across too many platforms.

Just like you can’t be all things to everyone, you can’t be everywhere and expect to succeed with limited time, focus and resources.

Sure, it’s not a bad idea to park your brand name on all the social media platforms you can. Go nuts.

But instead of wasting time and energy on a half-baked strategy, it’s okay to brand those profiles, then point people to the platforms you really care about.

For startups and personal brands with limited resources, I advocate for picking just ONE — maybe two — platforms to start with. Become a pro at those.

And if you decide to branch out later, do so only when you’re confident you can give those your all, too.

For larger brands and businesses with more resources, it’s still very much worth a second look at where your team should be spending their time, especially now.

Bottom line: pick the platform (or two) your ideal customer is spending the most time on, and go all in.

3. Posting the exact same content across all social platforms.

This is a rookie mistake that many brands still make. They’ll create a post, and instead of tailoring it for the platform, just blast the same message everywhere.

Social media scheduling tools often enable this bad behavior, by design.

Hootsuite, for instance, lets you create a post and then tick box after box indicating where you’d like to send it.

Facebook? Yes. Instagram? Sure. Twitter? If it fits, why not.

But what works on one platform won’t necessarily resonate on another. They may not even be formatted right, making your post look odd and out of place.

Not adapting your content for the unique culture and behaviors associated with each platform also signals that your brand is out of touch, and not interested in really connecting with users there — only with pushing a message.

Ideally, if we’re spending the time and resources to keep up with multiple social platforms, we’d also take the time to do it right. Otherwise, why even bother? This is part of why I advocate strongly for #2, prioritizing only your highest-impact channels.

Give your audience a reason to follow you at each platform.

This doesn’t necessarily require completely separate content strategies, especially if your budget is tight.

It’s possible to take a single piece of content, like a blog post or video, and find unique ways to distribute it across different platforms.

At the very least, vary your copy from platform to platform, and pay attention to the way your images, links, tags, and text are formatted across each.

Play around with timing, too, so similar messages don’t go out everywhere at once.

Whatever you do, resist the temptation to create “one and done” social posts for every platform and call it a day.

4. Ghosting your followers.

Most of the brands I see doing #3 are also guilty of this.

Social media is not a bulletin board for your marketing messages.

It is a community, of which your brand is only one member, meant for active participation and conversation.

If you “post and ghost,” or push out your content and then promptly log off, you’re missing out on the best part.

And if you never engage with your audience, they’ll never have a reason to engage with you.

It’s like my mother used to say: “If you want to get mail, you have to send it first.”

When messages and comments roll in, make sure you’re responding quickly. Don’t leave them hanging (Facebook’s paying attention if you do).

And spend time listening to and proactively engaging with your audiences — or if you’re still building one, your ideal potential customer.

The more you interact, the more brand equity you build — and the more you learn about your audience, which can inform everything from your future content to your actual products and services.

5. Focusing more on the Instagram feed than on Stories.

More than 500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day.

Meanwhile, the once-chronological, now algorithmic Instagram feed (the posts you actually see when scrolling through the app, and the squares that display on your profile) is getting less and less attention.

Stories are quickly eclipsing the feed as the main way that people create and consume content on the app.

So why are so many brands still focusing most of their Instagram content creation on the feed? This is an old marketing habit to break now.

The ideal posting frequency for stories vs. the feed will vary by brand. Experimentation is key to figuring out the right balance.

But if you’re currently creating 12-15 Instagram feed posts per month and only a handful of stories, try shifting the balance so that you’re creating more stories, even if that means fewer feed posts.

Successful brands stay top of mind by consistently posting stories nearly every day. The more people who watch or interact with your stories, the more the algorithm learns who’s interested in your content — and then keeps showing that content to them.

But stop posting for a stretch of time, and those views and interactions die off, breaking the habit the algorithm supported — making it that much harder to get eyes on your stories when you do share them.

The good news is that stories can be captured on the fly and quality expectations are lower. They provide more opportunities for endearing your brand to your audiences, with a lower barrier to entry.

This may mean you aren’t able to batch as much content creation, and will have to spend more time creating and posting on the fly. It may mean you’ll need more collaboration from your employees or team.

Whatever it takes, it’s time to adjust your social media processes and workflows to help make that happen.

6. Reporting on meaningless metrics.

Anyone with even minimal experience in marketing has reviewed (or even created) a nothingburger social media report.

Unfortunately, reports that tell you nothing about the true impact of social media are pretty common in the industry.

They’re usually created by in-house marketers, agencies or consultants that don’t understand your business, so they focus on the usual “vanity metric” suspects like followers and engagement.

Those are useful as overall health metrics of your social media accounts — but they do little to show the real meat on the bone.

Figuring out what role social media plays in your bottom-line business objectives is the first step to creating KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that count — and reports that actually say something.

Start with a strategy that connects the dots between social media and your larger business and marketing goals. Then, report on the metrics that show how well social is helping you move the needle.

7. Treating social media as an afterthought.

Every single one of these mistakes is the direct result of underinvestment in social media as a growth platform for your business.

If social media gets the short end of the budget stick, there are no resources for an ROI-focused strategy (#6).

Or investing in original photography (#1), whether that includes hiring a photographer or up-skilling your team to take better smartphone photos.

Without strategic oversight, there’s no time to spend thinking about where to really focus (#2), or how to tailor your content for the platforms you do prioritize (#3).

And if social media isn’t the dedicated focus of anyone on your team, there’s no time for things like community management and engagement (#4) or taking advantage of the micro-moments in your business that make for great stories (#5).

This happens at every budget level, too.

Even at big advertising agencies, social strategists often don’t get a seat at the table early enough when account executives, art directors, and brand planners plot large-scale campaigns.

So it’s not always about money. It’s about recognizing the potential impact of taking the time to do social media the right way, and appropriately directing the resources you do have.

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Read next:

What to post on social media during COVID-19

7 ways to strengthen your digital marketing before the crisis fades

Megan Van Groll

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