Have you read dozens of articles telling you social media strategies that you need to implement? Those can be a little overwhelming because the articles often differ in opinions on how often you should post, the type of content you should be posting, what social media channels you should be using, etc. We’ve tried many strategies for our clients, and have decided to share what we have seen that does not work in gaining social media followers and engagement. We’ve compiled a list of five simple strategies to STOP doing today that will save you time and streamline your social media marketing.

1. Speaking to Everyone
If you are speaking to a broad audience in your social media posts, you are missing the chance to connect with your target audience. We encourage you to imagine your ideal customer, and create a very specific user persona around that. How old is your customer? What type of lifestyle does he/she live? Single or married? Kids? Occupation? Location? Once you have created a personality to represent your target audience, speak to only that person in every social media post you craft. This mindset will easily help you create content and captions for your posts. Your social media followers should know within minutes of looking at the content on your platforms if your brand is a good fit for them.

2. Constantly selling
We’re sure you’ve heard this one before. Social media is meant to be social, not salesy. Write the majority of your social media posts to be engaging and conversational, providing your followers with value. When customers see your business as more than someone trying to sell them something, they will develop a connection toward your brand. In order to gain faithful, returning customers, your potential customers have to feel like they know you, they like you and they trust you.

3. Never selling
On the flip side, some potential customers will never purchase your products or services if you don’t ask for the sale. If the majority of your content is beneficial to your followers and your followers are you true audience (remember number 1), they will not mind an occasional social media post where you ask them to purchase your goods or services.

4. Posting & Ghosting
Posting and ghosting is when you share something on social media, then log off to continue with your other tasks. This is one of the biggest mistakes we see companies making on social platforms. They will ask “Why is my engagement not increasing?” and the majority of the time the answer is “because you aren’t engaging yourself.” We cannot stress enough that you need to be engaging with your followers and other users by liking, commenting, sharing and replying on all social media accounts. It’s amazing what engaging with others can do for your own engagement rates.

5. Having a Presence on Every Social Media Network
You do not need to be on every social media platform that you see other businesses using. Just because someone else has a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc. does not mean that your business should have a presence on all of those platforms as well. You need to learn what platforms your target audience is using and have a presence on those social media sites.

Do you have additional strategies that don’t work well? Let us know in the comments!