Social media marketing is no longer considered an alternative for companies today; it’s a necessity. With so many organizations vying for the ever-declining attention span of their customers, one tweet, or post at a time becomes vital for the organization’s success.
But having said all that, there are many brands that don’t exactly have social media figured out and have to cope with many obstacles and challenges. So presented below are some of the most common social media marketing problems and their solutions that brands should be aware of.
Challenge #1: Maintaining a genuine relationship with the target audience
Solution: In recent times, there has been a massive shift in terms of social media marketing trends. So one prominent challenge that social media marketers are dealing with is forming and maintaining a genuine relationship with their target audiences on an individual level.
Building a strong connection with your audience allows you to humanize your brand and develop a solid and genuine relationship. In order to form and maintain that connection, social media marketers can use the free or low-cost social media engagement tools like TweetDeck, or Mention to reply to every single comment on Twitter.
With these tools, you can also access every other social media platforms and revert to each comment effectively. You may also create and manage a group or forum on LinkedIn or Facebook; this offers you the opportunity to establish a connection with users and also opens up a platform for the users to connect with like-minded individuals.
Challenge #2: Measuring Social Media ROI
Solution: Social media ROI means the return that your business gets back after investing time, money and other resources in the social media marketing endeavours.
Now here’s the tricky bit, social media ROI can be different from traditional online marketing. Determining the value of your Tweet or post getting shared can be difficult as opposed to counting the number of clicks on an ad.
Social media ROI is primarily dependent on the specific objectives of your business, so the approach adopted by another business may not necessarily work in favour of your business. Before you can determine your ROI, you need to decide on the objectives of your company. So you need to ensure that you have clear and quantifiable objectives. Now in order to make sure that objectives are being fulfilled, you need to have a clear idea about the numbers. Like the numbers of,
- Newsletter sign-ups
- Downloads of an app
With objectives properly in place and the means to achieve them, deciphering your returns from social media isn’t all that complex.
Challenge #3: Understanding which social platform to leverage
You need to be acquainted with the demographics for every social networking platform and understand whether your target audience is among them. Check which social networking site is frequently accessed by your target audience. More than determining the whereabouts of your audiences, you need to see where they’re most active.
Getting a huge number of followers doesn’t guarantee you an audience. Considering social media platforms are infested with fake accounts, you need to be sure about the authenticity of your followers. Because ultimately if you’re not gaining the right audience, then it’s impossible for you to achieve the business objectives.
Once you make your presence felt on the social network, use the social media analytics tool to check the engagement with your account and audience demographics.
Challenge #4: A sharp degradation in the organic reach
Solution: The strategies that have worked a few years ago to increase the organic reach of your social media posts don’t exactly work anymore. This happens to be one of the crucial challenges that marketers have to deal with. One way of facing this challenge is to perceive the degradation of organic reach as an opportunity in disguise. This is when paid social media advertising comes into the picture.
Investing a little money behind the content you’ve created with so much effort will successfully make the content visible to a host of potential consumers. In this case, you can use the posts with high engagement but limited reach as a good parameter for success.
You can use the audience insights for Facebook and Twitter to know about them and develop buyer personas. Once you have an understanding of who these people are, use those insights to produce highly targeted ads that the users are likely to identify with the most.
Challenge #5: Using data to support the intuition effectively
Solution: Earlier it used to be a herculean process to gather relevant social media data, which was difficult to comprehend and were useless. But now there so many tools out there that collecting such data is a piece of cake for marketers.
To tackle this challenge, create an Excel spreadsheet with each of the social media sites that you’re managing on the left and the most crucial statistics you would like to know on the top.
Monitoring the social media metrics on a regular basis will allow you to understand whether your intuition right. Based on that you can carry out some experiments, collect the data and switch to another approach if things don’t work out.
Challenge #6: Creating high quality graphics and visuals for social media
Solution: Incredible graphics and visuals are the fundamental factors for gaining good engagement on social media. But producing quality graphics and visuals present a challenge of their own, considering the skills and time it takes to develop them.
Now since the visual content is 40 times more likely to get circulated on social media than other forms of content, that should encourage you to invest in visuals of your own.
Two of the most effective sources of amazing visuals are high-quality stock photos and authentic infographic created by the content team.
Challenge #7: making inconsistent efforts to manage social media
Solution: Often there are brands that fail to maintain consistency in the areas of social media marketing. As a result of their inconsistent attempts, they often end up questioning the effectiveness of social media as a favourable marketing channel.
That’ why you need a proper strategy in place. Chalk out the activities that will be carried out over a longer period of time, campaigns and initiatives which will take a few weeks or a month, and short-term activities that help to achieve the objectives. This includes creating a timetable for research, engagement, posting, evaluating and reporting.
Challenge #8: Developing brand awareness through social shares
Solution: Without proper engagement, you cannot hope to establish brand awareness among your target audience. This is probably one of most efficient ways to build an image of your brand on the social platforms. This will serve as a metric through which your effectiveness as a brand can be determined.
So other than encouraging your employees to share the content you post on social media, make sure that you post the things that your target audience finds appealing, and something that they would willingly share with their friends and family.
Challenge #9: The eternal struggle between content quantity and quality
For some brands, making the most of social media marketing means posting more content on different social platforms. While this may work for some, but one prominent drawback of this is that the followers may get irritated by the frequency of posts.
Now a remarkable way to deal with this age-old quality over quantity debate is to treat every piece of content, be it a tweet, a Facebook post, a CTA, or a press outreach email with proper care.
You will see an increase in the followers of your brand over time from posting amazing content, not posting more content.
Challenge #10: Answering All of Your Customer’s Questions
Communication (be it through social media or otherwise) is a two-way street. But often it’s seen as a tool for brand promotions. While marketers opt for social networks as broadcasting platforms, 90% of customers use social media as a way to liaise directly with the brands.
You can ensure none of the messages goes unnoticed by choosing a proper social media management tool. With all your social interactions in one place, you can offer cross-channel assistance and can determine whether it’s an issue to resolve or an opportunity to delight a customer or to join a conversation.
Once you move past these challenges, you can be sure that your social media marketing endeavors will bear fruit.
Author Bio: Priya is the technical content writer of Hopinfirst that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology and having a great experience in software development, mobile app development, website development and digital marketing.
