3 Worst Mistakes in Your Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns are a proven way to increase conversions and traffic to any online business. They can help you to boost your brand awareness and built a relationship between your target audience and your products and services.

However, there are several mistakes, which can be a cause for failure of your campaign. Let’s check out 3 the most major ones.

# 1 – Not checking your visual resources

The visual resources are one of the most important elements of any social media campaign. Most of the time, they are what drives people attention to your written content. And here are some stats to prove it for you:

• We retain 65% of any given information when it comes with a relevant image, against 10% when it doesn’t;
• Content with visual resources gets 94% more views compared to text-based only.
• 51.9% of marketers worldwide believe that video is the type of content with the best ROI.

It should be enough to show you that you certainly should spend as much time (and money) trying to perfect your visual resources, instead of adding the first free thing you find online.

# 2 – Not being careful with your words

Yes, English is just one language, but you know how often misunderstandings happen. You also need to remember that your social media posts will be read by anyone and anywhere in the world. It means people from different cultures, many of them with English as a second language.  That’s why you have to master content creation at your best.

Plus, no matter how much you might disagree with politically correct writing, you should obey it to the dot. There are topics that need to be handled carefully if you don’t want to sound racist, sexist, or else.

# 3 – Not doing enough research

Many mistakes could be avoided by doing more research. Because social media happens so fast, it is understandable why it happens, but your followers will not forgive you for that. You are a brand; you should know better.

Delta Airlines, Luton Airport, American Appeal, and others: why further research is crucial

For starters, Total Beauty website managed to confuse Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in a tweet, and it was hilarious. And the Republican National Committee posted on Twitter that Tammy Duckworth hadn’t stand up for veterans, while she actually had lost her legs while serving in Iraq – yes, that was highly embarrassing.

London Luton Airport also decided to use an image of a plane that slid off the runway and got a 6-year-old boy killed (probably without knowing that). The goal? Praise the fact that they are such a super airport. And American Appeal posted an image of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion to celebrate the Fourth of July – saying it was mistaken for fireworks.

Pizzeria DiGirogio, for instance, failed to understand what #WhyIStayed was about and tweeted “You had pizza” along with it. After endless apologies, their reputation was severely harmed.  What about Delta Airlines publishing a picture of what should be Ghana with a giraffe on it (a country with no giraffes around)? They even tried to fix it, but left a typo behind, and their apology mentioned their “precious” tweet instead of a “previous” tweet.

Lesson learned:

• It is essential that you understand well what is the meaning behind a hashtag if you decide to piggyback one of them.
• Verify your images, facts, and people’s names and biography before typing away
• Don’t have time enough to check anything? Then leave it. It is better to miss an opportunity than be remembered forever for the wrong reasons.

Your turn

And what about you? Which are the worst mistakes you have seen brands making on their social media campaigns, and how you think they should have handled it better?

Let’s increase our list and talk more about it in the comments below.