Ever since the dawn of social media, marketers have come up with all sorts of ways to use it to their advantage. But if you look at social media now and social media in the early 2000s, the online space looks entirely different.
However, it’s not only the UI that has changed drastically. Along with the evolution of the online customer, marketing on social media has gone through many changes in the past few decades.
While certain best practices remain true today, certain social media marketing strategies no longer work as effectively as they did before-and are thus not worth any more of your time. If you want to make the most out of your social media marketing, it’s high time to drop these outdated practices:
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1. Constant self-promotion
The younger generations don’t want to follow brands who talk nothing else except their products and services, much less buy from them. In the current times, you have to build relationships with your audiences before you sell to them; you have to make them feel that you care more than just making a sale.
Instead of constantly self-promoting, post different types of relevant content that resonate with your target audience. This can include user-generated content (e.g., reviews, testimonials, etc.), tutorials, polls, stories, social causes, and other types of content that fit well with your brand image and online persona.
2. Ignoring SEO
Some companies think that social media does not directly affect SEO. While this may be true to some extent, social media can still help your website rank higher on searches, primarily through posting links to your website. The more clicks you get from your followers, the more search engines will recognize your website as relevant to your target audiences.
However, boosting SEO with social media is not always as easy as posting links. If you don’t have the means to optimize your online content in-house, a call to an SEO company should be in order.
3. Mass following
Mass following is the practice of following huge numbers of accounts in the hopes of having them follow back. You can easily spot businesses that use this tactic by checking their ‘following’ and ‘followers.’ If the account has a near equal follower-to-following ratio, you’ll think twice about the authenticity of those followers or even if they are really people at all.
People on social media are warier of this tactic nowadays. Hence, they are quick to think that those followers are not genuine or probably did not follow the business out of honest interest. As a result, they don’t have as much confidence in the authenticity of the business itself.
4. Buying fake followers
It’s often difficult to build a good following from scratch, which is why many businesses turn to buying followers to get their numbers up quickly and easily. However, the big problem with buying followers is that those accounts are not all genuine, and most of them are either bots or fake profiles of fake people. They don’t actually bring value to your page apart from boosting your follower count, and they don’t interact with your content at all.
Worse, people are quick to notice fake followers when they see a lack of engagement. If you have tens of thousands of followers but only get 20 likes for each post, then it’s obvious that your following is not genuine.
5. Posting the same content across all platforms
Today, marketing tools allow businesses to schedule posts on different types of social media, making it easier to manage content and post at the most opportune times. However, the mistake that many businesses are making is posting the same content across all of their platforms because it’s the easiest way to post content, right?
The catch is that not every piece of content will work well for all platforms. Furthermore, each platform has its own media specifications (photo sizes, video lengths, etc.). If you post a video tutorial on using your product, you might find more success on Facebook because longer video lengths are allowed. If you post the same content on Instagram or Twitter, the video may get cut off, and you’ll have to post it in multiple parts. Hence, modifying the content to each platform’s specifications will ensure that your content works best for your followers on each one.
Social media is constantly evolving, and many strategies today may eventually become obsolete five, three, or even one year from now. The key is to stay adaptive. Continue learning from your audiences, and get rid of these outdated strategies in your social media marketing plan.
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