When you’re looking to execute a social media marketing campaign, the quality of your content is going to be a huge factor in how well your efforts move the needle.
While social media content has huge potential to drive more brand awareness and sales, if it’s not written well, your content could wind up being more of a hindrance than an asset.
If you’re embarking on a new social media plan, and you want to ensure you’re maximizing the potential value of your content, here’s five common social media marketing content creation mistakes to avoid.
1. Speaking Vaguely Without Specific Target Audience
One of the biggest mistakes brands make when tackling social media content generation is failing to properly define the audience they’re marketing to. Content that’s written with a vague idea of the audience is at risk of coming out as too generic and failing to resonate with any single buyer persona.
When you go into your content creation with a detailed picture of the audience segments you’re targeting, you’ll be better equipped to refine your content’s style, tone, and topical focus, achieving a more direct appeal to the people you’re trying to reach.
Some best practices you should consider when defining a target audience include:
- Conducting deep market analysis using both industry reports and your own primary research through surveys, audience analytics, and listening to discussions on the social media spaces where your audience spends their time.
- Segmenting your broader target audience into specific personas who share common characteristics.
These will help you plan and build content that captures your audience’s attention, resonates with them on a deeper level, and generates more click-throughs and conversions.
2. Failing to Link Content With Your Broader Business Goals
Creating detailed audience personas will be a big help in focusing on the topics and formats that are likely to engage your audience. However, it’s important to balance this with making sure the content you publish feeds into the broader goals you’re trying to achieve with your social media marketing.
Your content might be dominating the niche in terms of follows, likes and comments, but if it’s not built to move people to the next stage of your pipeline, you could quickly find yourself pouring a lot of resources into activities with diminished returns.
To make sure your content is serving your broader business goals, map out your buyer journey in a way that corresponds with your social media touchpoints, paying close attention to the pain points your audience faces at each stage.
When you create your social media posts, you can use this as a reference to ideate and review your content, making sure you’re positioning your brand as a solution to their pain points.
3. Neglecting Storytelling
Storytelling in any kind of content marketing has been shown to help capture people’s attention, humanize brands, and forge a deeper, more personal relationship between you and your audience.
If you’re neglecting storytelling in your social media marketing content creation, it could put a cap on your rate of engagement, and leave room for your competitors’ stories to take more of the limelight.
Some of the most effective ways to incorporate storytelling in your social media content include:
- Hooking your audience quickly with a compelling headline or imagery.
- Humanizing your content by centering it on a clear “protagonist” - e.g a client or a team member.
- Evoking emotions that get your audience invested and make them root for the people at the center of your story.
- Using series and highlight features and experimenting with content types to give your content a more engaging, episodic format.
Storytelling in social media marketing content creation can be difficult to master, but if you can keep at it, you’ll quickly see a positive uptick in engagement compared to posts that don’t use these techniques.
4. Failing to Balance Consistency with Platform Nuances
One of the most challenging things about social media marketing content creation is making sure you’re maintaining a consistent brand voice, while still respecting the nuances of each platform you’re targeting.
Not paying attention to the nuances of each platform could lead to a communication breakdown between you and your audience.
Platforms that are more community-based, where success is determined by existing followers or subscribers, (e.g Facebook and LinkedIn) will allow for long-form content with deep explorations of the topic. Those that are more centered around discovery and recommendations, for example Instagram, will call for a more inclusive style that’s likely to attract users outside your brand’s orbit.
For more support with adapting your social media marketing content creation to different platforms, be sure to check out our suite of free AI content generation tools. These allow you to use custom briefs to adapt your unique brand messaging into platform-friendly LinkedIn posts, Instagram bios, X/Twitter threads, and more.
5. Failing to Test, Analyze, and Adapt
As you roll out your social media campaigns and publish content on your chosen platforms it’s important to keep a close eye on your social media metrics, review content performance, and feed this into adapting your content practices for better long-term success.
When you come to review your content performance, some key things to watch include:
- How your website traffic, lead generation, and conversion has performed compared to the last reporting period.
- Which social media platform brought in the largest amount of leads and sales.
- Which content formats and topics had the most social media engagement, click-through, and leads.
- What commonalities connect the content that enjoyed the highest engagement and drove ROI.
By asking these kinds of questions, you’ll be able to highlight the content that’s performing better than expected, as well as those posts that seem to be missing the mark. This will allow you to build up a list of powerful insights to inform your future content calendar, and ensure you’re publishing more content that your audience loves.
For help with analyzing your content performance and leveraging useful AI-powered insights, be sure to check out our Highperformr analytics suite.
Avoiding Mishaps in Social Media Marketing Content Creation
Quality social media marketing content creation is far from easy, but by avoiding these common mistakes, you can keep your posts above a consistent baseline that will help you develop more effective campaigns in the future.
For more support with engagement analytics and content creation using the latest AI tools, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
