8 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid (Infographic)

There are so many resources available to social media marketers, so many hints, tips, and advice out there that it might seem easy to get your social media marketing efforts off the ground. However, new marketers or business owners trying to go it alone continue to make rookie mistakes. An infographic from Digital Marketing Philippines outlines basic mistakes to avoid.

The tips are fairly simple, but they speak to many problems in planning and approach that continue to damage social media marketing’s reputation. Whether it’s oversaturating your content, or missing the point of social networks, newer marketers make many mistakes, including the following 8:

Having no social media strategy
Creating accounts on too many platforms too soon
Paying for fake followers
Talking about nothing but the brand
Using irrelevant and excessive hashtags
Sharing too much in a short amount of time
Forgetting to proofread
Neglecting the “social” aspect of social media

These mistakes indicate a number of underlying problems that underlie the approach of new marketers. Signing up to too many accounts, using excessive hashtags, and only posting about the brand could indicate that a marketer is simply operating by a checklist gleaned from tip lists, or articles about the hottest social networks.

Choosing platforms and messages carefully to maximize the impact on your target audience will almost always be a better use of a marketers time than posting the same heavily branded content to multiple networks.

Posting too frequently and having no strategy are indicative of a marketer who doesn’t really understand the landscape. There are dozens of tools to help marketers run better campaigns, and establish real relationships with customers.

Paying for fake followers and neglecting the social aspects show that newer marketers don’t understand why they’re running social campaigns in the first place. Interactivity is the whole point, and if your account looks like a corporate bot, you’ll never cultivate brand advocates.

Instead of just providing marketers with tips and lists, maybe we should teach them why social marketing is such a good idea. For further explanation of why these mistakes are so bad, view the infographic below.