Posted by Social media is a great way to reach thousands of people with a single post. It allows for massive engagement like never before. Also, it can truly bring in large revenues for business owners when done right.
While this may sound wonderful, it also means that any mistakes you make in your social media posts will be on full display for the world to see. This can be the Achilles heel of your business as entire brands have undone all their hard work with a single embarrassing social media post.
Fortunately, we can learn from the mistakes of others and ensure that we don’t make the same errors, and that’s what this article is all about. We’ll cover eight strategies you can implement to reduce mistakes on social media.
Why publishing mistakes can harm your social media strategy?
What makes social media great is also what makes it unforgiving. Any mistake you make, you make in front of a large audience — one that’s usually more than ready to share its opinion and call you out publicly.
If you’re trying to build authority or project a certain image, then this can be quite detrimental. Especially to your brand and to your brand’s reputation. A publishing mistake left unnoticed will immediately be called out. It then is brought to the attention of the public too. That’s why you must take the necessary steps to ensure that you avoid as many social media errors as possible.
8 strategies to prevent social media errors
Since most brands have made errors of some sort before, it is not unusual to have brands implementing strategies to ensure that this does not occur again.
In most cases, the after-effects have been well documented, and brands continue to take precautions against such incidents.
Let’s dive into some of the top strategies that you can employ to ensure that you don’t commit any errors and embarrass your brand publicly on social media.
1. Reduce your publishing frequency to prioritize quality
You’ve probably heard the expression “less is more,” and when it comes to sharing content, especially on social media, the phrase still holds true. Think about it; social media users are constantly bombarded with content from hundreds of sources. When they see too much content from any single user, it quickly becomes annoying, and users won’t think twice about unfollowing or blocking you.
There’s also the added benefit that when you reduce the frequency of your posts, you’re forced to share only the most important or valuable content, meaning your posts’ quality will be significantly higher than usual.
This means that the chances of your post resonating with users and capturing engagement will be much higher if you’re only posting your best material. Most social media algorithms also favor posts that receive a lot of engagement quickly and appreciation from the public. Thus, they will often push these posts to go viral.
At the end of the day, you can decide to drop the quantity and focus on the quality of your posts. It’s the best way to ensure that you’re consistently delivering valuable content that people want to see. It’s also a great way to avoid becoming another account that regularly posts mediocre content and doesn’t capture anyone’s attention.
2. Limit your marketing to your top-performing platforms
Each social media platform is drastically different. Although it may not seem like that at first, the same marketing efforts on each platform will yield different results. While this might not be apparent at first, if you think about it, it makes complete sense.
Each platform has a different demographic that uses it. Yes, there might be some overlap, but each person usually has one or two platforms they’re most active on (even if they have accounts on all social media platforms).
This means that your marketing needs to be specific to the platforms that give you the best results or the platforms that are used by your target customer. For example, if your content is aimed at older people, you probably want to focus your marketing efforts on Facebook or Instagram. With 2.89 billion users, Facebook has the largest number of active users. If you’re targeting younger people, you might want to publish content on TikTok. Or, if you’re creating content for women, you might want to focus on social media platforms like Pinterest (which has a 78% female user base).
Instead of spreading yourself too thin by trying to be active, create content and post regularly on every single platform. Just double down on your strongest platforms and focus your marketing efforts where they work best. This is the most efficient to ensure the most conversions and provide long-term business growth.
3. Develop a branding guide to refer to
Your audience can smell inconsistency, and they detest it. But worse than an inconsistent image is a brand image that doesn’t resonate with your target audience. That’s why it is imperative to have a branding guide to refer to whenever you’re creating social media posts or content that is to be publicly shared.
Your brand needs to be consistent across every post and social media platform. This extends to color schemes, brand images, tone, and how you speak online. Your brand guidelines need to be extensive and ensure there’s no room for inconsistency when creating content to be shared. Here’s Netflix’s color branding guide, for example:
New employees or content creators can then easily refer to this guide while creating content and ensure that it falls within the framework laid down by the brand guidelines. This is a surefire strategy to avoid having inconsistencies in your brand’s posts or stances it’s taken publicly from existing or being pointed out.
Note: For best results, update your branding guide to adhere to new or emerging digital marketing trends.
4. Watch videos after you upload them
Often the sheer volume of content we have to sort through can be disorienting to content strategists. This means there’s often room for error when posting a video to your social media. Something you absolutely want to avoid when it comes to video marketing during a social media campaign.
Whether it’s an error in the editing, you’ve simply posted the wrong video, or perhaps there’s an embarrassing detail you don’t notice until after you’ve just uploaded your video, all of these errors can easily be rectified if you catch them early. So, start giving your content a watch after uploading it.
5. Develop pre-written responses to comments
Whenever you put out a quality piece of content on social media, it’s only a matter of time before the piece starts getting some engagement. This means that the comments will start pouring in, and your audience will begin expressing their opinion about the content you’ve just posted.
Replying to comments can do wonders for your reach as it boosts engagement and increases the chances of someone reading your post. There’s also the added fact that your audience is more likely to interact with your brand and consider becoming a customer if they feel like they have a rapport with the brand. Replying to and acknowledging the things your audience says in the comments is also a great way to build brand loyalty.
When you tackle difficult questions and negative feedback head-on by acknowledging and replying to what’s been said, it makes your brand look strong and full of integrity.
However, be careful who you pick to handle these situations and your social media in general. You need an engaged employee, preferably one who feels a proud sense of ownership with the business they work for and enjoys their work.
However, replying to people doesn’t need to be a struggle. You can take a good look at the various kinds of comments people have about previously published content. Once done, craft well-thought-out, detailed templates for how to reply to various kinds of situations.
These pre-written responses can be the difference between being embarrassed online or successfully tackling a difficult situation and coming out looking good. This is especially true when trying to deal with rude people online.
6. Invest in continuous learning and management
As time goes by, things will continue to change. This means that what was once acceptable may not always remain okay. This applies to jokes, public statements, and even affiliates and influencers that have ties to your brand.
There’s also the added fact that the way social media pushes content can change with every tweak to the algorithm, and new social media platforms that never existed before can come into existence and rise to relevance quickly.
The only way one can successfully navigate this change is by adopting an attitude of continuous learning and improvement. This applies to how you manage everyday duties as well as how much time you set aside each day for learning new and relevant information that can make an impact. Often we spend much less time than we think we do on these activities. So, it’s worth using a time clock calculator to ensure that you’re putting in the hours when it comes to self-improvement.
Keeping abreast of all the latest information and relevant changes can give you an edge over every one of your competitors online, allowing you to come off as well informed and relevant — a combination that’s always looked upon favorably online. It can also improve your ability to adjust rapidly to major changes to your branding and online presence.
Make sure that this attitude of constant improvement is one that’s shared by your entire team. With the help of a little resume parsing, you should be able to make sure you’re only hiring qualified people for your social media team that are enthusiastic about constantly learning and improving.
7. Use content optimization tools
Optimizing is one of the most important things you can be doing. And, avoiding it means you’re leaving a lot on the table. As far as possible, always optimize the content you post for the verticals you’re trying to target.
This can include optimizing the formatting of content, images, and videos. Or the time of day most suitable for capturing the maximum engagement or the day of the week when most of your audience is online. You can even optimize the hashtags you use, the number of posts per day, or the description and captions you share with each post.
When it comes to optimization, the list is endless, and everything counts in some way or another. That’s why it’s probably best to use content optimization tools to help you out. They can simplify the process and save hours of your time by assisting you with basic optimization.
8. Establish a formal approval process
A formal content approval process is an absolute must, no matter what you create content for. This is especially important for social media. While getting started might take a while, once such a system is in place, it can streamline workflow considerably.
You can get started by outlining your content goals and informing your team. Try to avoid involving too many people. Just the content managers and other involved parties (social media consultants, copywriters, photographers, virtual assistants, etc.). Preferably those that are familiar with the work and everyone in the organization. Then begin with creating a clear workflow and making sure everyone on the team is familiar with it.
Then set up very strict brand guidelines and make sure everyone is familiar with these. Lastly, you can also implement a timeline for projects. This is to make sure that the work gets completed on time and quickly.
If properly implemented, your content approval process should allow you to identify and fix mistakes early. It means before they’re published, while simultaneously targeting the appropriate audience.
Everyone makes mistakes — just don’t publish them
While you’re certainly going to make errors in your content, if you’ve read this far, then you have all the necessary tools and strategies. It’ll definitely ensure that you can avoid publishing any of your embarrassing mistakes on social media.
As long as you’re using one or more of the above strategies, you can rest assured that the chances of an embarrassing blunder making it to your social media page are incredibly low. That being said, when things do occasionally go wrong, and you make a mistake, always address it head-on and apologize.
Your audience will appreciate your genuineness, and the mistake can be a learning process for everyone involved.