7 Sins of Social Media Marketing

This article is part of SWOT Team, a new series on Mashable that features insights from leaders in marketing, brand-building and public relations.

Remember when social media was a new, unchartered territory for brands? Consumers flocked to platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn overnight and marketers knew that, in order to stay relevant, they had to follow suit. 

Fast forward to today: 97% of marketers use social media to connect with buyers. The problem is, most still haven't figured out how to leverage social to create a personalized, relevant and enjoyable experience for their audience.

Socially awkward brands aren't just pushed to the sidelines, they miss out on building valuable relationships, or in some cases, end up on a viral list of social media blunders. Whether your brand is too boring, too tone-deaf or too promotional, your social media approach can’t be an afterthought. Here are seven deadly sins of social media marketing to avoid at all costs to keep your audience engaged, interested and loyal.

1. Being all talk

Image: Flickr, smkybear

The key to social media content is to show, not tell. Audiences prefer engaging with visual content over text anyday; did you know that tweets with image links get an engagement rate 200% higher than those with just 140 characters? Flooding your feeds with line after line of text could cause you to miss out on a huge opportunity to connect with your buyers. Instead, we should be emulating brands like Oreo, whose Twitter feed is addicting thanks to charming illustrations, clever videos and mouth-watering images.

Lucky for us, it’s easier than ever to share visual content, thanks to free design tools like Canva and seamless embed options on social platforms. For marketers, a picture really is worth a thousand words — act accordingly.

2. Putting on a one-man show

Trying to apply your advertising approach to social is a big mistake. In fact, one of the reasons social media is effective is because so many people tune out traditional media and mass messaging. On social, it’s even easier to mute brands that talk, but don't listen — with a quick click, consumers can unfollow or remove your content from their feed for good. Instead of talking about yourself nonstop,

make your audience the center of attention by highlighting their interests

make your audience the center of attention by highlighting their interests, like Monster Energy on Facebook, or sharing their content on Instagram like Sharpie. Your social following isn’t a captive audience, so take a break from broadcasting and start sharing content they'll actually want to click on.

3. Forgetting to think before you tweet

Staying relevant today isn't easy — trending topics go from viral to ancient history daily. So how can marketers keep up? Cue newsjacking. Instead of trying to generate buzz from scratch, brands piggyback on the popularity of top headlines to amplify their own content. We see clever newsjacks during the Super Bowl and the Oscars, but occasionally, the not-so-savvy attempts end up being headlines themselves.

Last year, AT&T earned serious social backlash for a failed 9/11 tribute, and, Gap crossed the line when it took to Twitter to promote discounts during Hurricane Sandy. It’s true that marketing today is time-sensitive, but you'd rather be late to the game than be perceived as offensive.

4. Thinking all social platforms are created equal

                Image: mkhmarketing

Your social strategy shouldn’t be one size fits all.

Your social strategy shouldn’t be one size fits all. For example, B2B audiences spend most of their time on LinkedIn, while B2C buyers can be found on Facebook, according to Social Media Examiner. Find the channels that best align with your audience's interests, then experiment with the type, cadence and style of content you think will resonate most. Measure what works and what doesn’t and optimize accordingly. Instead of publishing the same content to every channel, the best social media teams create tailored approaches based on the medium and the message.

Need inspiration? Check out GE’s Vine, JetBlue’s Instagram, L.L Bean’s Pinterest or Cap’n Crunch on Twitter. Each has a pitch-perfect approach for the company and the channel.

5. Putting your customers on mute

It used to be that if a customer had a complaint about your product or service, they could tell their friends, family or a 1-800 number. Today, consumers can share negative reviews with their entire network — and the searchable social web — through a simple click. Not surprisingly, 72% of customers who complain about a brand on social expect a response within an hour. But in some cases, they are lucky to get noticed at all. This Facebook post from McDonald’s sparked tons of nasty comments slandering the company's food and service, but last I checked, the Golden Arches hadn’t chimed in to put out the fire. Whether you have a handful of followers or 31 million Facebook fans like McDonald’s, you can’t afford to ignore your audience, period.

6. Forgetting to be a human

Image: Flickr, Henry Schimke

In an age where buyers are constantly bombarded with deals, promos and ‘lowest price’ taglines, your brand’s personality is crucial to stand out from the pack. Corporate jargon and automated replies will send your audience running in the other direction, while brands that aren’t afraid to let loose will be welcomed with open arms. This Twitter conversation between Pizza Hut and one of its followers is a great example of a brand having fun with its personality.

Ultimately, building a community of brand advocates today isn't about what you're selling, it’s about what you're saying. Luckily, the casual nature of social media makes it easier than ever for us to talk to our audience like humans.

7. Assuming your social strategy works

In the Mad Men era, measuring the true impact of your marketing efforts was nearly impossible. Luckily, marketers today have more data than ever to truly understand how our efforts impact the company’s bottom line. Still, of the 88% of brands using social media platforms for marketing, only about 37% are taking the time to measure the ROI of their efforts. It’s easy to tally likes and retweets to get an idea of how engaged your audience is on social, but those numbers don’t tell the whole story. There are myriad metrics to consider to help put a dollar value on your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn efforts. Having a data-driven handle on your marketing’s impact is something even Don Draper would be envious of.

Today, the customer is in control, and they expect marketers to know where, when and how to connect

Today, the customer is in control, and they expect marketers to know where, when and how to connect with them on social media. Every marketer has a different road map for getting there, but avoiding these seven social mistakes can help us all steer clear of serious potholes.

Content Source - http://mashable.com/2014/08/28/social-marketing-sins/ 

Twitter vs. Facebook as a news source: Ferguson shows the downsides of an algorithmic filter

While Twitter has been alive with breaking news about the events in Ferguson, Mo. after the shooting of an unarmed black man — video clips posted by participants, live-tweeting the arrest of journalists, and so on — many users say Facebook has been largely silent on the topic, with more info about ice-bucket challenges by various celebrities. Is this a sign of a fundamental difference between the two platforms? In a sense, yes. But it’s also a testament to the power of the algorithms that Facebook uses to filter what we see in our newsfeeds, and that has some potentially serious social implications.

Part of the reason why Twitter is more news-focused than Facebook has to do with the underlying mechanics of both sites, and the way user behavior has evolved as a result. Because of its brevity, and the ease with which updates can be shared, Twitter is a much more rapid-fire experience than Facebook, and that makes it well suited for quick blasts of information during a breaking-news event like Ferguson.

Flaws in the symmetrical follow model

Facebook has tried to emulate some of those aspects of Twitter, with the real-time activity feed that sits off to the right of the main newsfeed and shows you when someone has liked a post, or what they are listening to on Spotify, etc.. But even with that, it’s more difficult to follow a quickly-evolving news story easily. And while Twitter has added embedded images and other Facebook-style features over the past year or so, Facebook is still filled with a lot more content that makes it difficult to process a lot of information quickly.

Then there’s the nature of the community: although Facebook has tried to embrace Twitter-style following, which allows users to see updates from others even if they aren’t friends, in most cases people still use the platform the way it was originally designed — in other words, with a symmetrical follow model that requires two people to agree that they are friends before they can see each others’ updates. On Twitter, users decide to follow whomever they wish, and in most cases don’t have to ask for permission (unless someone has protected their account).

As tech-blogger Robert Scoble argued during a debate with Anthony De Rosa of Circa, there are ways to fine-tune your Facebook feed so that it becomes more of a news platform. Like Twitter, Facebook allows users to create topic-driven lists, but the site doesn’t spend much time promoting them, and they are difficult to manage (to be fair, Twitter doesn’t make its lists very prominent or easy to use either). Facebook has also tried to become more of a news source via the Newswire it launched along with Storyful earlier this year, and product manager Mike Hudack says the site is working on other ways of surfacing news better.

Better for friendships than news

In the end, Facebook’s model may be better suited for creating a network of actual friends and close relationships, and for keeping the conversation civil, but it isn’t nearly as conducive to following a breaking-news story like Ferguson, unless you have taken the time to construct lists of sources you follow for just such an occasion. And then there’s the other aspect of the Facebook environment that makes it more problematic as a news source: namely, the fact that Facebook’s newsfeed is filtered by the site’s powerful ranking algorithms.

As University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a recent piece on Medium, the Facebook algorithm makes it less likely we will see news like Ferguson, for a number of reasons. One is that the newsfeed is filtered based on our past activity — the things we have clicked “like” on, the things we have chosen to comment on or share, and so on. That keeps the newsfeed more relevant (or so Facebook would no doubt argue) but it makes it substantially less likely that a sudden or surprising event like Ferguson will make its way past the filters:

“I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure. Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?”

A technical issue but also a social one

As the term “algorithmic censorship” implies, Tufekci sees this kind of filtering as a societal issue as well as a technical one, since it helps determine which topics we see as important and which we ignore — and David Holmes at Pando Daily has pointed out that if Twitter implements a similar kind of algorithm-driven filtering, which it is rumored to be considering as a way of improving user engagement, Twitter may also lose some of its strength as a news source.

In a sense, Facebook has become like a digital version of a newspaper, an information gatekeeper that dispenses the news it believes users or readers need to know, rather than allowing those readers to decide for themselves. Instead of a team of little-known editors who decide which uprisings to pay attention to and which to ignore, Facebook uses an algorithm whose inner-workings are a mystery. Theoretically, the newsfeed ranking is determined according to the desires of its users, but there’s no real way to confirm that this is true.

In the end, we all have to choose the news sources that we trust and the ones that work for us in whatever way we decide is important. And if we choose Facebook, that means we will likely miss certain things as a result of the filtering algorithm — things we may not even realize we are missing — unless the network changes the way it handles breaking news events like Ferguson.

Source - Twitter vs. Facebook as a news source