Social Media Marketing: 5 Reasons Why it’s Not Working For You

By: Aeron B. Espanillo

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media has taken the world by storm. It transformed how we communicate, share information, and interact with each other. This year, there are an estimated 5.17 billion social media users around the world with each using an average of 7 social media networks per month. With these statistics, social media has become a prominent way for businesses to market and advertise their products to millions of people, slowly moving away from traditional methods. Deemed as social media marketing, this refers to the use of social media platforms to build a brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Moreover, this helps businesses to engage with current customers and reach new ones.

What are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

Around 92% of marketers use social media as an avenue for marketing activities, and 77% of businesses use social media for brand awareness and revenue drive. This is because social media marketing provides several benefits such as:

Brand Awareness: Social media platforms provide a vast audience for businesses to promote their brand and increase visibility.
Targeted Advertising: Social media allows for precise targeting based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more, ensuring that marketing efforts reach the most relevant audience.
Customer Engagement: Social media provides a direct line of communication with customers, allowing for real-time interaction, feedback, and engagement.
Cost-Effective: Social media marketing is often more affordable than traditional marketing methods, with many platforms offering flexible advertising budgets.
Customer Insights: Analytics tools on social media platforms provide valuable data on customer behavior, preferences, and trends, helping businesses make informed decisions.

Social Media Marketing: Expectations vs Reality

Despite a number of businesses using social media for marketing and aiming to get the benefits it provides, a huge number of them fail to get the results they want and fall short of their expectations. Generally, there’s a tendency for businesses to have expectations that may not always align with reality. An example of this is first, instant results and going viral. Just like anything else, social media marketing may take time. It demands constant effort, postings, and engagements over a period of time to build online presence and obtain a number of followers. Second, the quantity of followers equals success. Quantity doesn’t always translate to quality. Having engaged and well targeted followers interested in your brand is more important than just having many followers as the goal is to convert them into customers. This misalignment between expectations and reality often creates challenges that hinder success. Understanding and addressing these challenges can significantly enhance the effectiveness of social media campaigns. With that in mind, let’s explore five reasons why social media marketing might not be working for you and discover remedies to turn things around.

5 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing is Not Working For You

You Have No Clear Plan

Your social media marketing may not work because you have no overall plan. Most businesses jump into SMM by just posting content. A plan is important as this outlines the objective you want to achieve, the strategies you need to implore, and identification of the key performance indicators to monitor progress. Without a plan, you’ll likely be unsure of what you want to get out of your efforts and just employ a random plan of action.

To turn this around, develop a comprehensive social media marketing plan. This includes defining business objectives, identifying social media goals, and establishing KPIs. For example, if your objective is to grow the brand, the accompanying social media goal is awareness. This can be measured through looking at the number of your account’s followings and content shares. Meanwhile, if your objective is sales, the social media goal should be conversions and the metrics used can be sales made through websites, conversion rates from social media insights, and surveys from customers. You may opt to book your own social media manager here through agencies that offer such services.

Inconsistent Posting

Try to think of the last time you got turned off by a brand’s social media page because they haven’t posted in a while.

Hardly posting on social media accounts may be detrimental for your business. As stated earlier, SMM’s results are seen through consistent posting. This is crucial for engagement as consistency builds the audience’s interest and keeps your brand name in their mind. If you’re currently employing this move, create a content calendar and stick to it. Having a calendar helps you plan what content to create and publish. This also helps you to check what publications have been posted, what is scheduled to be posted, and what more you need to add. With consistency, you gain trust from your customers and they’ll be more likely to buy from you.

Ignoring Analytics

One of the advantages of using social media for marketing is the analytics they provide. Analytics pertain to data gathered from your social media channels. If you use Facebook, it provides you an overview of how your page and post are performing. They also provide recommendations based on the data of the selected time period. Without taking advantage of the analytics, you ignore the opportunity to understand what’s working for you and what’s not. Thus, you might not improve or repeat actions that do not help you achieve your objectives.

To start reaping the benefits of analytics, regularly review analytics to measure the success of your campaigns. Look at metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and audience demographics. Use this data to adjust your strategy and improve future campaigns.

Poor Quality Content

Visuals or aesthetics are important if you want to capture attention online. In today’s social media where every scroll up and down displays good quality content, it’s hard enough already to compete, and with a bad quality content you further reduce your chances of succeeding. A poor quality content can be badly designed graphics, irrelevant posts, and long passages of text. If your audience sees this, they might easily direct their attention to something else.

To make sure that you produce high quality content, invest in high-quality content creation. This may involve hiring a professional designer or writer. Ensure that your content is visually appealing, relevant, and valuable to your audience. Moreover, rather than an overly sales oriented content, try to highlight rather how your product can solve your customer’s problems.

Disregarding Engagement

One of the reasons why social media was created is to socialize and communicate, which in your case is done by engaging with your audience. Since communication is a two-way street, you reach the full potential of social media when you actively interact and respond to your followers. If you’re only broadcasting messages without engaging with your audience, you’re missing out on fostering a sense of community and building loyalty.

If you don’t engage enough with your followers, try to make it a priority. Respond to comments, answer questions, and participate in conversations related to your industry. Use polls, quizzes, and other interactive content to encourage engagement. Showing that you care about your audience’s opinions can foster a loyal community.

Key Takeaway:

Social media marketing has revolutionized how businesses connect with their audience, leveraging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to enhance brand visibility, drive sales, and engage with customers. With an estimated 5.17 billion users globally, social media provides unparalleled opportunities for targeted advertising, customer engagement, and insightful analytics, making it an essential tool for modern marketing strategies. However, success in social media marketing requires clear planning, consistent posting, high-quality content, and active engagement with the audience. Understanding and addressing common pitfalls—such as lacking a strategic plan, posting inconsistently, ignoring analytics, producing poor content, and neglecting engagement—can significantly improve the effectiveness of social media campaigns and help businesses achieve their marketing objectives.

Need a fix for your social media contents, calendar and analytics? Contact us now and let us drive your social media presence right where you want it to be.

References:

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics