When done well, social media marketing can significantly increase your annual sales figures. When done badly, however, a social media marketing campaign has the power to destroy your business’s reputation overnight. This article contains six common social media marketing mistakes that you need to avoid.

Mistake 1 – Being over promotional. You should use social media platforms primarily to build relationships with your consumers. Many businesses wrongly believe that social media is an advertising medium only and they bombard their followers with non-stop promotional messages and corny sales pitches. Using social media platforms for advertising messages only is a sure fire way to lose followers. You need to provide something of value to your followers to keep them interested in your business.

Mistake 2 – Failing to respond to comments on social media websites. If someone makes a negative comment about your business, you need to respond to the comment quickly in order to show others that you are a credible business and that you care about your customers. Equally, when people post positive comments about your business, you should take the time to respond appropriately.

Mistake 3 – Failing to act on market research findings. Social media platforms are exceptional market research tools. By analyzing user activity and comments on your social media pages, you work out how to “tweak” your marketing campaigns in order to make them more effective. Furthermore, you use any feedback that you get from customers to improve your business’s future product or services.

Mistake 4 – Forgetting to proofread your content. If your social media pages are littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, many people will assume that your business it not a very professional organization. Therefore, try not to rush social media posts and make sure that you already read over them several times before publishing them, so that you can be sure that there are no silly errors.

Mistake 5 — Trying to do everything by yourself. Controlling a live social media marketing campaign can be very time consuming. If you have a large following, it may be impossible for you to manage all of your social media profiles, respond to comments and publish new content on a regularly basis. Outsourcing some elements of your social media marketing campaign can save you a lot of time and stress.

Mistake 6 – Publishing boring content that offers no real value to readers on your social media pages. If you can’t write engaging posts, consider outsourcing your content creation. Nobody wants to read boring articles that are stuffed full of blatant call-to-action statements. Publishing such content will lose you a lot of followers and impact on your business’s reputation.

The six mistakes presented above are only a small selection of things that businesses need to avoid if they want their social media marketing campaign to be successful for the long term. Remember, social media marketing campaigns can be very effective, and they are arguably the cheapest way to increase your business’s profile.