Social media is ever evolving and has transformed the world into a global village. With these platforms, everything today is global and has the potential to reach out to the masses. With great branding and marketing potential, we get to hear a lot of myths related to social media which need to be addressed. The social media myths if believed can certainly harm your brand and the branding strategies that you aim to execute on social media. To make things work for your brand, you need to learn what social media myths are to be avoided.
Let’s make things clear by debugging social media myths.
Your Brand Can Become Popular Overnight
Brands and marketers on social media often set goals to become popular in less time. They aim to create content that has the potential to viral instantly. With just this aim of becoming popular in less time, marketers go after likes and follow-ups, but this does not last long. The reason being, social media users do set expectations from such brands to consistently create the content of the same quality and when they fail to do so, people start unfollowing the brands.
Thus, it is essential to work on ways to get followers organically even if it is a slow process. By getting followers the other way around, you may end up engaging with irrelevant users rather than your potential clients whom you need to run your business. It is important for you as a brand to engage with quality prospects and build a healthy relationship via social media platforms.
It Is Compulsory to Be on Every Social Media Platform
Cross-platform content sharing and brand presence do matter, but this does not clearly mean that a brand must be present on every social media platform. Successful social media branding begins with proper focus. You as a brand need to study where your potential prospects on social media maybe and the type of content, they might be interested in.
Being active on every social media platform can be much of fatigue and this way, you may not be able to focus on the right channels to acquire quality leads. Your energies must be utilised on the right platforms to target the right audience.
You Need Thousands of Followers for Brand Building
Thousands of followers on social media sounds like a great thing, but this isn’t a necessity for brands to grow online. Do a great number of followers bring in better results? The answer is not always yes.
Just as mentioned before, you must be focused to know what results you require from your social media branding strategies, and this must not be followers. As a brand, your goal should be to build a loyal and quality relationship with clients so that they stick with you. The followers’ quality matters way more than the followers’ quantity. Even if you strive to get more and more followers, make sure they add value to your brand and understand what it has to offer.
Social Media is ‘Set and Forget’
One of the major social media myths says that social media is set and forget, which means that marketers just need to publish content and see magic. This isn’t happening, since social media is global and your content potentially reaches out to masses, users will engage with your content. When they do, you as a brand or marketer must be there to answer them. Every time someone chooses to engage with your brand, they take out time to address a concern waiting to be answered from your side.
Similarly, in many cases, this set and forget resulted in major social media crisis for brands. Their content was perceived negatively which led to a lot of backlash from the users’ side. Furthermore, if users see a brand which is inactive in terms of response but actively posts content, they find it offensive.
Frequent Posting Can Help in Branding
Posting multiple times a day will take you nowhere but will leave a bad impression on users that you as a brand need attention and likes. Ideally, you need to set times to post at least once in a day or twice, but not more than that. But if you have a lot of content and the urge to show it to the world as soon as possible, you may use the story features of various platforms such as Instagram to publish content more than just twice.
By overloading your followers with content, you will dramatically decrease the information retention. By sharing less content over the week, you can increase the chances of better reach and engagement simultaneously.
You Don’t Need A Plan to Begin with Social Media Branding
They say that ‘no plan is a failure of plan’. This act similar in the case of social media branding. You must begin by planning out on your goals, audiences, resources and later metrics to be measured.
Social media may seem very easy in terms of publishing content and getting engagement, but this isn’t the case really. As a brand who needs to begin branding on social media needs to set the purpose of its strategies. Why are you using social media? For brand awareness? Conversions? Or other goals? After which you need to know your audience; age, gender, preferences etc, everything matters equally at this stage. Your resources are to be set, which means the type of content that is to be created to address the audience type. Later this plan also must include the metrics need to be measured to check the branding success.
Social media is dynamic and consists of a lot of little technicalities needed to be worked onto.
Every Brand Must Measure Similar Metrics to Evaluate Success
This social media myth is highly deceiving as not every brand has similar goals and neither do all metrics show a success. Moreover, the KPIs-key performance indicators are also different for various brands depending upon their goals. Here are a dozen metrics that may help you determine your brand’s success:
⦁ Impressions
⦁ Reach
⦁ Video views
⦁ Website traffic
⦁ Clicks
⦁ Engagement
⦁ Conversions
⦁ Customer lifetime value
⦁ Time spent on page
Even though we spend a major chunk of our lives on social media, we are still unaware of various features that it has. And so do these social media myths make our lives difficult as marketers, but after executing various social media marketing and branding strategies we have been able to debug them. Not to worry since we have got you covered! Drop-in your social media branding queries in the comments below to get answered!
