Even the biggest social brands are believed to make mistakes socially. Number of Social Brands is increasing everyday and with each passing day, brands are trying to evolve, compete and reach out the audience through the social networks.

With the popularity of social networks, it is becoming difficult to stand out and get the required impressions for the right audience. The challenge is again of customer engagement. People think it is easier to manage the content and therefore the brand on social networks but it isn’t so, posting a content which leads to customer engagement and further induces customer interaction is a prime requisite. Brands usually consider the number of likes a success on social networks and that is why became prey to those who sell the number of likes on paid basis. That kind of success doesn’t leads to any brand benefits.

Despite the constant activity, brands fail to make a mark and sometimes even miss out by committing some common mistakes which must be avoided. At 30TH FEB we always make it a point to save our brands from these common mistakes, to list a few:

Mind your Brand Elements

The Brand Elements shall be consistent on all the social channels which you use to communicate about your brand. The brand colors, the brand message, the contact details – all should be similar in visual and voice.

While the Brand Elements are advised to be consistent, the social media manager shall be careful with the tone & communication on different social channels.

Avoid OVER-Selling

The first & foremost criteria for a brand should be customer engagement and to make significant announcements about the brand. In a haste to reach out most of the times we find repetitive or irrelevant content on a brand space which shall be avoided.

Also it should not read like another page which posts things taken from major search engines as that is negative sign for the brand. So, a brand space should offer utility & benefits – that could be tips, comic shares, news update or anything which shall be of use to your target segment.

Mind the CONTENT

Also important is to choose & manage the content with brains. Truthfulness and relevance is important and it is significant that there are no mistakes like spelling, grammar or even pictures. A little ignorance sometimes leads to big confusion and causes identity crisis.

Over posting and under posting of content, both are not advised to social media managers. Also too much of content automation sometimes looses the excitement and engagement as it makes the space predictable and hence reduces the interest levels, which is however positive when there is a regular posting of original content.

Sending automated Direct Messages to all the twitter followers is one such practice which is less connecting and more robotic and is not really appreciated by the new followers.

MANAGE Interaction

Many a times, it is observed that a customer’s query is left unanswered, the brand inbox is filled but the response is ever awaited and sometimes the direct messages in twitter are made to wait for months. These practices take away the prospective customers.

Deleting the Negative Comments or Complaints is also not advised. In turn, they should be answered in a polite way and the customer shall be thanked to point out a flaw and taking time to share the same with you. A corrective measure will only lead to better word-of-mouth publicity and brand advocates.

No Call for Action

One more important aspect is posting content and reverting to the client queries without including any call for action. Offering free consultation is often practiced by most of the service driven businesses where in they forget to make a sale call in the interaction of telephonic conversation followed by such promotions.

With one of our client, we noticed that if the Sales Team is not trained enough on how to handle the calls generated through Social Media, chances are that brands will end up losing business at the closing level of Sales process.

Some of the Quick tips for managing Social Network better are:

1. Overuse of #hashtags on twitter
2. Including a URL in the status window of face-book. Have you noticed that the thumbnail of the link auto-generates while posted in status.
3. Posting articles without any engaging/intriguing image is a Big No. Plain text fails to catch the attention and hence lower engagement.
4. Not following the trending social channels in your target group.
5. No timely tracking and adjusting will only lead you to create a brand dead space.

I hope the above post better your brand’s social experience. You can write to us for more details for your social brand at, ask@30thfeb.com Happy Socializing!