In today’s world of marketing, having a social media presence is vital for building your brands awareness.

With new trends and constant updates, it’s important to be ahead of the game and avoid making mistakes when starting out. Being on social media is a crucial part of raising awareness, enabling you to deliver your message and understand you, and your brand. Social media is a journey, and mistakes can be made along the way, but it’s better to avoid making them, so here’s how... 

Mistake 1 – Not Having a Clear Goal or Strategy 

When starting out on social media, one of the most commonly made mistakes is not having a clear goal in mind or a strategy to help your brand grow. Not having any goals to work towards or a strategy to follow will contribute to a lack of low follower growth and interaction, wasted time, irrelevant content and inconsistent branding or messaging!  

To avoid this mistake, before beginning social media define your goals and objectives, ask yourself what do you want from this? What is the end goal? Your goals could include generating new client leads, bringing traffic to your website, building brand awareness or building a community. Then think about how you would be able to achieve this, what can you do to reach this goal? Figure out what steps it will take to get you there and create a consistent content plan. 

Mistake 2 – Targeting The Wrong Audience 

Targeting the wrong audience can cause serious setbacks and stall your growth. When you’re reaching people who aren’t interested in what you're posting and offering you may have low engagement, no follower growth and mis-matched followers who will later unfollow after realising the content isn’t for them.  

To prevent this from happening, you need a clear idea on who your target audience would be. Consider their age, their gender and even profession, get specific with what kind of person you are aiming to promote or sell to. What would your target audience be interested in? What platforms would they be on? Why would they care about your brand or content? These are all factors which you should consider whilst defining your target audience to avoid promoting to the wrong audience.  

Mistake 3 – Not Using Analytics  

Not using analytics can stop you from being able to decipher what you're doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Without checking analytics, you aren’t able to improve what you’re doing, which could mean you may be posting all the wrong things and not be able to see what you should do differently and get the right content out.  

To avoid this, start looking at your analytics on a regular basis, whether it’s weekly or monthly, as long as you’re keeping a close eye on them to see what you're doing right and wrong. You can use analytics to test out new social media trends, you can do the trend and then review its impact after! 

Mistake 4 – Being On Every Social Platform 

Sometimes when individuals start out their social media journey, they can get ahead of themselves and start on every social platform that there is! Starting out with every social platform isn’t the best option. When you’re trying to build a community have all different pages, this can be confusing and unclear to your followers. Not all brands work on every platform either! If you’re on multiple platforms and one isn’t preforming well and getting interactions, then you should probably consider coming off it. 

To avoid this mistake, make sure that you start up with 2 or 3 platforms and focus on those. This way you can use your time to focus on growing those specific platforms and creating a community.  

Mistake 5 – Over Promotion 

Over-promoting and constant selling can start to make your followers feel no connection with you and your brand. It’s important that you aren’t just constantly overwhelming your audience with promotional, in-your-face content. It can start to feel pushy, causing people to unfollow and become uninterested in your brand. Over-promotion can also ruin your brands reputation. 

To avoid this, post relevant and informative content to keep your audience interested in what you're posting. Being able to be real with your following is a key part of social media marketing, always be honest and your relationship with your followers will grow, and people will stay interested! 

Starting out on social media is a journey and it can sometimes be a difficult one but being able to notice what mistakes are made and how you can avoid them is crucial.