With it’s impressive scale of reach, many businesses flock to causal media and use it as one of their marketing channels. Before diving into your social media marketing campaign, there are numerous pitfalls, which I really don’t want to see you tumbling into.

In this post, I’ll uncover the common mistakes you should avoid when planning your social media marketing campaign.

Remember your business objectives

How often have you followed a business on Twitter only to find them posting generic tweets on a daily basis which either simply link to their product pages or old blog articles? Well, bad news for them - they’ve fallen head first into the trap labeled ‘posting for the sake of it’.

Before embarking on a social media marketing campaign, review your business plan. What are your objectives? Are they to grow a business, which prides itself on being a thought leader within its chosen industry? Perhaps you want to be the company to which people head when looking for an eco-friendly boiler. Design your content and posting strategy around those objectives.

Set yourself a budget - you’ll need it

Social media marketing offers great reach, but it isn’t free. If you want people to see the content you publish, you’ll often need to pay the service you’re using as the distribution channel. Social media is now a ‘pay to play’ platform - plain and simple.

‘Organic reach’ is the term Facebook uses to describe the way in which individuals and businesses can put their Facebook posts in front of people without paying for the privilege. According to the social media giant, organic reach is declining because of the volume of content on Facebook and the algorithms they use to serve the most relevant posts to users.

Set a budget for social media marketing, because you’ll need it.

Localise your social media campaign

If you market to an international audience, make sure you take into account any cultural differences to the way we conduct business in the UK. Language which works fine over here may cause offence in other countries and different working patterns may call for a change to your post scheduling (the Spanish siesta, for example!).

It’s also easy to miss out on content delivery opportunities if you neglect to take into account certain circumstances in other countries. For instance, Germany’s long-running dispute with YouTube over the ability to live stream has resulted in businesses missing out on promotional opportunities.

Pay attention to your competitors

The competition will be using social media to promote their business, too (if not - more fool them). They’ll either be getting it right or throwing good money and resources down the drain, so make sure you keep an eye on their activity and learn from it.

Tools such as Simply Measured, Sistrix and Impactana are brilliant for helping you monitor your competitors’ performance on social media.