We recently ran a piece on the most relevant social networks for your business in 2016. Now that you have a handle on what social media platforms you need to be on, you should start to understand social media best practices and articulate areas that may be hindering you social media strategy. You may have invested a sizeable amount of time and money into your social media roll-out but you are not seeing much of a ROI. Read on as we shed light on the reasons why social media isn’t working for your business.

Incorrect Posting Time

You could be posting at less than optimal times, this will limit your reach and OTS (opportunities to see). Play around with posting times. There are no real hard and fast rules within reason. The best way to ascertain when to post is schedule a batch of posts and look for trends in times that give the best results – there is also a lot of research around this.

Ignoring Analytics

Too many people post content without analysing insights and analytics. It’s important to understand that what you don’t measure, can’t be managed – pay attention to social media analytics. There are many free analytic tools on the market, in addition, most social media platforms offer their own analytics feature.

Posting Irrelevant Content

You think you are spot-on with your choice of content but it is possible that you are wrong. You need to mine for insights to have a true understanding on what your audience wants to see. There are several ORM tools (e.g. Brandseye or Crimson Hexagon) that are effective at unpacking insights. You should definitely consider them to garner the necessary information that is going to help you to deliver the relevant content to your audience.

No Established Tone

If you are communicating to your audience without an established tone, you are setting yourself up for failure as your audience will find it difficult to establish trust and a connection with your brand. A consistent tone that is in keeping with your brand is going to help your audience to familiarise themselves with the relevant channel and forge a connection with your brand.

Poor Community Management

This could be another reason as to why social media isn’t working for your business. Moderators who do not take cognisance of page comments or do not respond to audience members timeously are disintegrating the relationship between brand and audience.

The community manager should respond to page members within a reasonable timeframe and responses should always come across as sincere and authentic, rather than mechanical.

Utilising Improper Platform Etiquette

If you do not understand platform etiquette, you will most likely annoy your audience. Etiquette varies from platform to platform so you need to act in accordance. For example – tweeting several times a day is acceptable but if your post several times a day on Facebook, your material could be perceived as spam.

Too Much Product Pushing

Social media is a wonderful place to punt your product but you need to take heed not to overdo it. If your audience perceive your product-push as too frequent or overbearing, they could be repelled. You should rather look at finding the perfect balance between extrinsic and intrinsic content. In this regard, content marketing works wonders. Oversell equates to overkill.

If you’re finding that social media isn’t working for you then these may be a few reasons why it isn’t. It’s a good thing to really try different things out and see how they affect interactions and actions with your brand so that you can see what works and what doesn’t.