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Last updated on May 17th, 2023

Social media is one of the most powerful tools that brands can use to market themselves. Your brand can establish connections with your consumers on those platforms while also promoting your brand without or at minimal costs. Social media marketing does everything a business needs to promote itself, making it very appealing across industries. Yet, if you don’t know how to use it, none of the benefits matter. That’s where these social media dos and don’ts come in.

Many businesses of all sizes and kinds aren’t using social media to its full potential. There are plenty of factors as to why, but one of them is the ever-evolving and changing mechanics of digital marketing. Methods that worked now may not work the following year; hence, adaptation is important.

As a marketer who wants to utilize social media best, you should review your strategies constantly to improve them. This year will be another one of adjustment and refining online ways to stay competitive. Read on to learn about the social media dos and don’ts for beginners in 2021.

Have a question, comment or thought to add? Leave a comment at the bottom and I’ll reply right away 🙂

Social Media Marketing Dos And Dont’s For Beginners

Note from Kayla: This is a guest post by Edwin Deponte. He is a motivational writer who is passionate about anything digital and social media marketing-related. If you’ve been a reader on Writing From Nowhere for a while, then you know that I talk exclusively about Google and Pinterest for online business use and never brush on the subject of social media. Edwin is here to fill that gap for us!

Social Media Marketing Dos

Let’s start with with the dos. Some of these might sound obvious, but once you read this list, you’ll start seeing accounts everywhere that are missing important pieces!

1. Complete and update your profile

One thing that marketers usually overlook is the details in their brands’ social media profiles. Your business social media account should have all the information that potential customers will be looking for. Don’t leave out anything, especially contact details and the address on your website.

Don’t forget that social media also appears in search engine results pages (SERPs). People will have direct queries that your social media pages can answer, such as email addresses and phone numbers. It’s one way your social media accounts can affect search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, as a reputable social media marketing company would know.

You can also show your creativity when creating or updating your bio. You can use it as a way to entice consumers to check out your products and your website.

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2. Make unique, engaging, and genuine content

Half of the battle in social media marketing is content creation. The better content you have, the more users your account will attract. That’s the challenge for marketers nowadays because social media is a sea of different forms of content.

Social media users are exposed to different forms of content every single day. It’s your job to find out what appeals to them and what doesn’t. With that in mind, the best approach is to stay on brand and be genuine.

Being yourself is what got you your following in the first place so stick to that. People nowadays will know if a business isn’t true to its identity, so think carefully before rebranding.

3. Use the best content for a platform and mix things up

Each social media platform has its characteristics, and understanding them helps to gain more engagement. Knowing the platform’s characteristics will determine what kind of content and messaging your target audience will find appealing. For example, various brands on Twitter often use polls because of the engagement it gets from their followers, and it’s ideal for quick and to-the-point messages such as multiple-choice questions.

In connection with appealing content, users also consume various types of content across several social media networks. They’re also not attracted to the same types, so posting various content regularly is important. Put some thought into whether your content is more suited to be an infographic, a video, an image, or an article.

Note that you can present one topic in several different ways. That maximizes your research, information usage and helps to stay relevant because you can present the same topic through different media.

4. Interact with your audience and make relationships

Simply uploading content and posting on schedule to keep your campaigns rolling won’t do anymore. You have to interact with your followers and users who share or comment on your posts. Feedback can be two-way on social media, and you can use that to build your customer base and retain current ones.

One of the benefits that social media gave businesses is a platform to communicate with their customers immediately. Customers can send them all kinds of feedback, such as complaints, and they can answer them in real-time. You should take advantage of that to start building small relationships with your customers, which is something that they’d appreciate.

Establishing real relationships with the following you’ve built manifests itself in the form of data and sales. Through the ongoing interactions with customers on social media, you can learn the essential information you can utilize to market your products better to convert more followers to paying customers. Your objective for social media marketing shouldn’t just be to gain followers but to earn friends.

Social Media Marketing Don’ts

Now that we’ve covered the good, it’s time to move onto the bad.

1. Rely too much on AI and automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are great tools for managing your social media accounts. It simplifies the execution of your campaigns, from posting to gathering data. However, you must not rely on them too much because it removes the human aspect of social media marketing.

The social component of social media marketing is an essential part of your strategy. Therefore, you should avoid over automation, such as using many automated responses to answer customer queries. Also, AI isn’t a replacement for human interaction. While it saves you time, you shouldn’t use it to engage your followers because a machine won’t help develop a relationship with them.

2. Share without researching or consent

Sharing user-generated content is common nowadays for most brands. It’s a nice way of interacting with users, and it can also be part of their content strategy. However, people perceive sharing content as an endorsement, so you must be careful before clicking share.

Always do your research before sharing content from another account for all platforms. If it’s coming from a regular citizen, be courteous and ask permission before sharing their post. Don’t forget to cite your sources as well so that you don’t get attacked or sued for plagiarism.

3. Overuse hashtags

Hashtags allow for cross-referencing of content sharing. It’s an efficient way of getting more eyes on your content across different platforms. You can also use it to boost the signal of your advocacies and promotions like product discounts, sales, and even job vacancies on social media.

You shouldn’t overuse hashtags much like what other people and brands used to do a few years ago. It’s an unwritten rule of social media not to place the hash sign before every word on your post. Besides, it’s just a waste of space to do it, and not every word is search content relevant to your brand or posts.

4. Focus too much on the numbers

Having lots of followers is great and all, but it’s not all there is to social media. Just because you don’t have more followers than your competitors doesn’t mean you’re not doing great. As long as your engagement rates keep on improving, you’ll do good.

It’s easy to get caught up in statistics to achieve your social media goals; however, you must remember that quality is better than quantity. For example, no spam accounts following you are better than having tons of followers consisting of bots.

Final thoughts

Hopefully, these social media dos and don’ts for beginners can help you up your social media game this year and moving forward. It’s a challenging endeavor, but it can be fulfilling once you get the hang of it. Remember to focus on all the important things and be open to adapting and trying different methods.