Social media is a valuable marketing channel for businesses, it allows you to connect with your target audience and promote your brand. But there’s no fool-proof strategy for getting your social media perfect straight away, it’ll take some time to learn from your mistakes and refine your approach. These are 5 of the most common social media optimization mistakes beginners make.

What is social media optimization?

Social media optimization is essentially using social media to grow awareness of a business, brand, product, or service. It’s a way of increasing your online presence and connecting with customers.

What are the most common social media optimization mistakes?

Choosing the wrong social media platforms

When you’re starting out on social media it can be tempting to jump on every available platform and start posting. The more content you’re getting out there the better, right? Wrong. You don’t want to waste your time on platforms that aren’t suitable for your business.

If you’ve got multiple social media accounts to manage it can quickly take up most of your day, and if they’re not the right platforms you’re going to see very little engagement. Posts on the wrong platforms aren’t going to reach the people you’re trying to connect with.

Do some research to really understand the typical user base for each social media platform, and assess whether it matches up with your target market. For example, if you’re looking to sell tools and hardware, how likely is it that the customers you want to reach are going to be on Instagram? You could be regularly sharing great content, but it’s a waste of time if the people you want to buy your products aren’t going to see it.

Posting at the wrong time

You’ve put all the work into choosing the right platforms and the right content, but you’re still not seeing the results you expect. Your next step is to take a look at when you’re posting your content.

You can read hundreds of different articles about the best days of the week and the best time of day to post to different platforms. While it’s worth taking these into account, the key to finding out the best time to post is by experimenting and looking at the data from your accounts. You have access to the best information about what time doesn’t work and what time does for your content, so use it.

Not setting up tracking

Once you’ve set up accounts on the platforms that you think will work for your business it’s important to keep an eye on the engagement you receive. Set specific goals for each one and monitor whether you’re achieving them.

Social media marketing, like all marketing channels, is a continuous process of trial and error — learning what works for you, what gets the best engagement, results, and conversions. Working hard to find the right social media platforms, tailoring and optimizing your posts, and sharing them at the right times is essential to getting the most out of your marketing.

There’s no point just blindly posting stuff and hoping for the best, you need to come up with some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), set up regular analytics tracking and review the results. If the results aren’t what you were hoping for then you need to go back and reevaluate and refine your strategy.

Each social media platform is also going to be regularly updating and modifying their algorithms. And user interest and engagement will change over time - so your strategy needs to be flexible and responsive. Auditing your strategy once a month is the best way to stay ahead of the curve.

Sticking to the same content

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut once you’ve set up your social media strategy — you write all your posts at once and schedule them to post at regular intervals. But the content you’re posting needs to be exciting and engaging to keep people interested. Try sharing different kinds of content such as profiles of your team members, new product launches, tutorials, and contests.

And don’t just stick to writing — video has the best engagement rates of all content formats. Not only do people retain 95% of a message in a video, compared to 10% when they read it in text, but videos are far more likely to be shared. Videos are easier than you might think to create, and they don’t have to be very long, in fact, short-form videos often work best on social media.

Not optimizing keywords and hashtags

Keywords aren’t just important for SEO on your website, they are also very important to your social media strategy. They will help your content stand out in your customers’ busy feeds and it’ll help your posts appear in search results on the platform.

Each platform has slightly different requirements, but generally, it’s important to include relevant keywords and choose appropriate hashtags. For example, on Instagram and LinkedIn users can follow particular hashtags, so using the right ones is a good way for people to discover you.

But when you’re adding hashtags to your posts it can be tempting to go with the most popular ones but you’ll see less engagement than you expect. The most popular hashtags aren’t going to be specific enough to your business or your industry, and there are so many posts being published every second that yours will be buried before anyone sees it. You want to use hashtags that have been used on thousands of posts, not millions.

Find the best hashtags for your posts by looking at what your competitors, peers, and influencers for your industry use, look at related hashtags, and keep experimenting with different ones.

These are just a few of the most common social media optimization mistakes. Overall using social media is going to require a lot of trial and error, so learn to track your posts and monitor results so that you can keep optimizing.

Kayleigh Alexandra is a writer for Micro Startups, your online destination for everything startup. She's passionate about hard-working solopreneurs and SMEs making waves in the business world. Visit the blog for your latest dose of startup and charity insights from top experts around the globe @getmicrostarted.