Our Social Media Marketing mistakes guide is designed to help you review and improve your approach to social media marketing. It’s practical and actionable since it covers common mistakes and how to avoid them.

It’s perfect if you are managing an existing social media presence and want to review it, or if you have just gained responsibility for social media.

Our mantra at Law Firm Marketing Agency for managing all digital channels is Plan, Manage, Optimize and this particularly applies to social media since it is all too easy to “just do it” without thinking about your business goals, strategies and how to measure its contribution.

With a managed approach, you are giving your business the best chance at realizing good return on investment into social media marketing, and to hopefully avoid the common pitfalls many brands make.

So whether you’re just starting out with your social media strategy and need a few tips, or have found yourself in an of the scenarios included in this sample guide, follow our advice to give your planning a kick-start.

Our social media statistics compilation shows that social media is used by 2.3 billion people in the global population (31%) so it gives a huge opportunity to reach and engage your audiences. Yet, our experience of irregular updates to social media company pages, poor customer service and poor quality of content shows that many businesses are still not all getting the most from the opportunity.

There are many potential reasons, but one is the that there are so many opportunities. There are so many platforms and ways to interact (that evolve rapidly), that it can be completely overwhelming. It's so easy to get started with social media, that it may seem that devising a social media strategy without a template to follow is not necessary or too daunting. It can be much more tempting to 'just get it out there' without thinking. 

Put simply, a lot of businesses don't, but really every action you take on social networks should be part of an integrated social media strategy. 

You should start by creating a plan for social media that follows the SOSTAC structure which we recommend overall digital marketing strategy and each digital channel. 

Using this approach, the planning document should include:

You may have a firm grasp of who your customer is and how they behave offline, but do you know how they interact on social media? And remember, whether you are involved with them or not, your customers will already be talking about your brand or product. 

Which brands do they follow? How do they interact with content? Which types of content elicit an action? Which social networks do they use most? When are they online? What are they talking about and sharing?

These are just a few questions brands should really know before you can hope for significant engagement. Without any knowledge of this, you may not even be concentrating on the right social network that your customer is using!

Use third-party tools to monitor how your audience really uses social media, the types of conversations they are having about your brand and topics of interest, where they are having them, and what you can learn from you competitors.This can help to identify people that are in the 'Convert' and "Engage' stages of the RACE framework, as you can actively reach out to them directly. 

- Where most engagement comes from e.g. which platform

- Brand mentions (including product names) to see what people are saying about you. 

- Campaign or related hashtags

- Sentiment - are you being mentioned positively or negatively?

- Alerts or news of relevance -- engage with it to show authority on an issue

- Your advocates and possible influencers

- What your competitors are sharing and how engaging it is

Social media is an activity that can be started from day 1 without any kind of planning, and really, anything can be shared out to an audience. What usually happens with this approach though is that the substance of what is being shared becomes weak, or important events are overlooked. 

Why would someone continue to follow your Law Firm's brand when you are not giving them a reason to? 

To see real success from your social media efforts, we advise that build a sufficiently detailed content calendar explaining the type of content that your brand wants to share, whether it needs to be created or already exists, dates to be planned/avoided, and how, where and when it'll be distributed. The idea is that whatever you share builds awareness, familiarity, purchase intent, or even post-sales follow-up/ repeat purchase as part of customer lifecycle marketing strategy. 

Your content marketing plan should answer the following questions:

- What types of content do you intend to post promote on social media?

- How often you will post updates?

- What is the target audience for each type of content?

- Does the content already exist?

- Who will create the content if it is new?

- How will you promote it?

Once you have answered the questions above, your editorial calendar should include dates and times you intend publish Tweet, Instagram and Facebook posts and blogs that you plan to use during your social media campaigns.

Also make a note of important events to include (ahead of time) and also avoid...

- Where most engagement comes from e.g. which platform

- Brand mentions (including product names) to see what people are saying about you. 

- Campaign or related hashtags

- Sentiment - are you being mentioned positively or negatively?

- Alerts or news of relevance -- engage with it to show authority on an issue

- What your competitors are sharing and how engaging it is

In-keeping with the last point, whilst forming your content plan, deciding who will be responsible for the channel is a key piece of the puzzle.

Without a dedicated person (or team if you are lucky), social media can bumped down the list of priorities over time meaning that updates can become infrequent or non-existent. We have seen this mistake many times and are sure you have too.

If resources are limited you may also find these problems:

- Keeping each social presence up to date with content relevant to its audience can become impossible so content is shared with a broad-brush approach 

- Social profiles go days, weeks, months and even years without an engaging update (that your competitors may be taking advantage of)

- Profiles lose tone of voice and consistency

- Updates lack purpose

- Allocate a person(s) to take responsibility for planning and managing your social media strategy – if you don’t have the in-house expertise, look to outsource

- Give them clear priorities

- Give them time to do it (on top of their existing workloads)

- Give them the tools to save time e.g. Hootsuite or Sendible to schedule posts, to trigger actions based on events, Google Analytics dashboards etc.

- Agree processes for planning, approval and publishing

Without the correct KPIs and reporting metrics in place, there is no way of really understanding if you are concentrating your efforts in the right places. You won't be able to say what, when or why a piece of content encouraged more engagement than another, and you probably won't be able to compare it to past or future activity. Worst of all, you won't know the commercial impact of your social media activity -- how does social media impact leads or sales? 

So in short, you'll have absolutely no idea how well your social media activities are working. 

You may also be focusing on the wrong metrics such as pursuing 'likes' or 'followers' numbers, rather tahn engagement. Growing your numbers can be tempting, but if they are the wrong people for your target audience (through poor targeting), there for another reason (e.g. serial 'compers'), or being ignored once they are there (seeing no posts from you), there is little point. 

Time is precious for everyone though, and pilling through endless reports or data, won't be effective. 

- On a daily basis, check the in-built insights reports for each platform -- monitor daily fluctuations to be able to spot a change quickly and react e.g. a sudden spike in brand mentions or engagement on a particular post. 

- On a weekly basis, as well as keeping an eye on your follower numbers, look at what is happening as a result e.g. referrals from social to your website, time on page/ visit depth, sales, goal conversion etc.

- On a monthly basis, compare performance month on month, compare periods to prior year, look at KPIs affecting acquisition, engagement, conversion and retention. 

All too often, brands have great planned content with dedicated resource, but forget that the key to engagement is conversation – even brands you’d just assume had it down.

Answering and responding to comments is a massive part of the jo. This is where youycan actually interact on a 1-2-1 level with a customer, whether it’s helping with a pre-sales query, troubleshooting with a product question, responding to a complaint, or helping with an after-sales query. This highlights the need for dedicated resource even more.

Social media as an extension of your customer service and as mentioned earlier in this guide, can touch every aspect of the customer.

- Always questions or queries – even if negative

- Don’t EVER ignore a negative comment!

- Monitor Brand and hashtag mentions (and misspells) regularly -most people get the handles wrong and you may never know about a mention

- Reshare, retweet, repin or repost content if mentions are positive e.g. blog reviews

- Providing useful content to help your followers based on FAQs

Whether you like it or not, once piece of content, offer or news story is in the wider environment, people will take to social media to talk about it. Unfortunately, even if it's a good piece of news, it won't always be fed back on positively. Jumping on angry bandwagons is also something that social seems to fuel periodically. 

Social media is another communication method that can be used by brands to help with situations e.g. to offer information or to allay fears around an issue, but often also be the cause of PR disasters, such as the sharing of an incorrect image or statement. 

- Tackle problems head-on – never ignore comments, always answer them with a polite response, and do it as quickly as you can

- NEVER argue – use social media to suppress anger and diffuse situations; offer a response but also direct communication offline e.g. to an email address, private messaging platform or call centre

- Don’t delete posts – you can ‘hide’ them if they are offensive, but never remove comments

- Plan for escalation – in the event of a more major disaster, have an agreed route to escalate it to inform social media managers of the right people to reach out to for advice

- Assign responsibility --- prevent mistakes by assigning one person to post updates, and employ an improval process to check the content plan

- Monitor brand reputation -- check that your customers are not discussing your brand without directly mentioning you; less than 3% of customers directly @ mention brands on Twitter. http://ow.ly/Zhbf30qAzKZ

Not all brands feel the need to use social media advertising, and for smaller businesses perhaps budgets will stretch to sponsored posts. If there is money in the pot though, like any form of advertising however, investment can lead to greater growth of brand awareness (if done properly).

It’s important to remember therefore that sponsored activity does not replace the effort you need to put into the management of your social media profiles, and that poorly managed advertising strategy will also not contribute as efficiently.

- Decide upon the right network to use for sponsored advertising – if budgets are small, try to not spread yourself too thinly

- Likewise, be realistic about your budgets – ensure you are getting a good ROI for any spend

- Decide what your goals are – this may also help you to decide upon network

- Don’t forget about ads – don’t let them go out of date e.g. special offers, pricing changes, out of stock products etc.

- Report on your creative – use insights to assess if the targeting and creatives are working and direct future ads

A common mistake a lot of businesses make is in treating each network the same, and assuming that the users also behave similarly.

People usually actively engage with one or two social networks usually multiple times daily, and use others less frequently. They pick their ‘favorite’ based on how comfortable they feel within the environment (the user experience), connections they have (friends or contacts), and the purpose for which they are using the network (socially or professionally).

When it comes to how brands use social media however, there tends to be a hierarchy of importance based on size and potential reach

– particularly in B2C. Facebook tends to take the lion’s share of interest, which is hardly surprising given that it has 1.71 billion users

Quite often though, content is planned for Facebook and just ‘shared out’ to the other networks without much consideration of whether it is engaging to those audiences, or if they are even there. The same could be said for B2B messages on LinkedIn that are broadcasted to more consumer-centric networks.

For example, You may have an actively engaged brand page in the UK, out in another country, perhaps Twitter has a better community to interact with. Age is also a factor with which identifying which could be the most effective for your brand.

- Never share blindly 

- Craft posts independently so that no characters are lost or links or images displayed incorrectly due to limitations of each network

- Identify your communities in their own environments – look at what they are sharing or with whom they are interacting, and tap into that specifically rather than blankly pushing out a message intended for another audience

- Pick your social networks of priority according to your data and objectives 

- Don’t just copy what another brand is doing out of fear 

Once upon a time, it took a while for brands to realize where social media should sit as part of the marketing mix. At that point, it sat on the periphery of teams and no one was really sure how and by who it should be handled. These days, social media is more widely recognize to be integral to marketing, customer service and corporate communications.

That said, a lot of brands still fail to integrate social channels with other communications channels, paying little attention to the role it plays in the wider customer lifecycle marketing strategy. 

Social media tends to take focus during the early stages in the customer lifecycle, in attracting and in influencing a sale (for promotion). It can however also play a part in later phases, such as repeat purchase remarketing, community engagement post sale, social customer

service and in gaining feedback.

New research reveals though that most brands are still not paying attention to consumers who want to communicate via the social platforms. In this survey, 90% of respondents said they had used social to communicate directly with a brand, with only 11% of users receiving a response. Meanwhile the brands sent out 23 promotional messages for every response provided to their fans. This means that the focus is very much on sales, rather than the rest of the lifecycle journey which can only lead to fan disengagement.

Ensure social media does not sit in isolation:

- Consider the touchpoints that social media has on your customer’s interactive journey (from promotional content, presales questions, to post sales troubleshooting or advocacy)

- Adapt your communications or contact strategy to integrate these into the full range of marketing communications channels to support prospects and customers on this journey