*Updated June 21, 2022

Social Media Strategies for 5 Common Social Media Challenges

Using social media well for your brand isn’t always as easy as it seems. In this post, we’ll be exploring social media strategies to address the following social media challenges:

  1. A lack of strategy
  2. Too much automation
  3. Anti-social content on social media 
  4. Robot-like personality
  5. Inconsistent effort

Social media marketing is no longer optional for most businesses. With so many battling for the diminishing attention span of consumers, there are a lot of businesses and organizations winning the hearts of their audiences one tweet, snap, and post at a time. But not every brand has social media figured out, and many of them run into problems. 

We’ll soon get into more detail about the five most common social media problems and how to go about solving them, but first, a word answering the question…

What Is the Goal of Social Media Marketing?

Ultimately, the goal of social media marketing is to generate more revenue for your business by:

  • Improving customer experience through monitoring and responding to social media comments. This supports high-quality service and demonstrates your company’s commitment to customer needs and desires.
  • Increasing customer engagement by actively listening and having valuable conversations with your customers and prospects.
  • Positioning your company as a thought leader, not just as a provider of goods or services. Do this by demonstrating authority and gaining recognition with unique insights that aren’t found elsewhere.

5 Social Media Challenges

There are five familiar social media challenges. But rest assured, we also present the solutions to social media problems so you can confront the challenges head-on.

1. Lack of a Strategy

Problem: So much of social media marketing is conducted without any clear strategy in place. For example, there are 582,000,000 Google search results for the phrase “the importance of social media marketing.” 

So we all agree social media marketing is important. Great—but the certainty of being successful with your social media is much closer to 0% than 100% without a plan in place.

Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/cat-studying-strategy-3R9LDINpbGX2o/

Solution: Like any other facet of digital marketing, a sound social media strategy starts with clear objectives. These could include community building, branding/awareness, lead generation, engagement, driving traffic/audience building, and others. From there, you’ll need to outline specific strategies and tactics that support your organization to accomplish the objectives that benefit your business.

2. Too Much Automation

Problem: Too many brands are automating important social media tasks, and you know what? Their fans can tell. This isn’t to say that automation and social media are incompatible. Automation can help you scale a function of your business and gain benefits from improved efficiency. But if you’re relying on a tool to do all of your liking, commenting, following, or posting, you aren’t going to build a connected audience that confers lasting value to your business or organization.

Solution: Speaking broadly, we only like to automate “back end” social media tasks relevant to scheduling, reporting, and analyzing our client’s presence. This means we leverage tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, ManageFlitter, Iconosquare, IFTTT, rules inside of Facebook Ads Manager, and others to effectively manage social media. 

None of these tools have a significant impact on how our clients’ accounts interact with their audiences over social media. That’s because these tools don’t: 

  • Post content we didn’t write 
  • Like, comment, or follow 
  • Send spammy DMs to other accounts

3. Anti-Social Content on Social Media

Problem: Businesses miss the mark with social media when they treat these platforms like a megaphone where they shout directions—“Click here! Read this. Retweet that!” Too often companies hit publish on a link to their latest blog post or a fun picture from a recent company activity and wonder why clients are not lining up to buy products or services from them. The reason could be that these companies are not investing time in their followers, but only see social media as a one-way channel.

Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/real-detective-farrell-IhpYzoqmRz8EU/

Solution: Successful brands treat social media more like a group therapy session (a bit of an awkward analogy, we know) where the business is the discussion facilitator. They start important conversations around topics relevant to their audience. They help solve problems. Most importantly, they listen to feedback and take the actions necessary to improve the situation by solving their audience’s problems with content, customer service, or even a sale.

In practice, this means you shouldn’t just hit the “publish” button and log out for the day. It means you should share the content your audience is looking for AND spend time engaging with them to add value, even if you don’t stand to benefit right away or at all.

4. Robot-Like Personality

Problem: Businesses disengage from their audiences when their social media posts and activity resemble those written by a robot. This is related to some of the common problems we’ve outlined above, namely lacking a strategy and engaging in antisocial behavior. A brand is behaving more like a robot when they are hesitant to share opinions, utilize key hashtags, express emotion, and use emojis.

Solution: Envision your brand as if it were a person, a friend. Your friends have opinions. They have humor (hopefully). And they have a personality. They even make mistakes, grammatical or otherwise. They like, comment, and share posts from their friends. They get excited. They get sad.

To create a brand personality, we suggest an in-depth review of the brand’s value proposition, posting language, and opinions by key members of the executive, marketing, branding, sales, and customer service teams. If you work for a smaller organization, meeting with the founder can be an insightful experience and can really help identify ways your brand can relate to an audience using human-like behavior.

5. Inconsistent Effort

Problem: A lot of brands, especially smaller ones, struggle to be consistent in key areas of social media marketing: inconsistent posting, inconsistent engagement, and inconsistent analysis, just to name a few. Unfortunately, inconsistent effort leads to inconsistent results, which leads to doubts about the performance of social media as a viable marketing channel.

Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/3ornjMfYXNDHHfowqA/

Solution: Once you’ve put a strategy in place, put your plan on a calendar. Map out your big picture phases and activities over longer periods of time (months or years), your campaign level initiatives over intermediate periods of time (weeks to months), and your short-term activities that push the objectives along in your daily calendar. This includes carving out time for engagement, research, posting, analyzing, and reporting.

Do any of these social media marketing issues sound familiar? Did you have any of these problems and you worked out a solution? If so, let us know how by reaching out on Twitter.

Work with Our SEO Team to Grow Your Business

There’s a lot more you can learn about social media strategy, social media challenges, and the solutions to social media problems. Where to begin? 

  • Read more about how to utilize social media to better your business:

Contact us for help putting together the best strategy for your brand. We’d love to help!

Julie Snow
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