Social Media Challenges and how to use them as opportunities

Building a strong social presence is becoming more and more challenging today.

Competition is fierce, and if you’re not already getting noticed by consumers, you aren’t achieving your goals.

You know you need to make yourself stand out from the crowd, yet so much can go wrong and often does.

Yet, consumers expect more from social media now, and you need to find a way to deliver.

No longer can you just wing it and hope for the best.

Instead, you’ll need to spend more time understanding, designing, and implementing your social media marketing activities.

Not only do you need a designated strategy and team to execute it, but also a change in mindset, turning social media challenges into opportunities.

5 Social Media Challenges and How to Use Them as Opportunities

As the social media landscape continues to change and evolve, so do the challenges that marketers must deal with and conquer.

Below are five of the more common challenges social media marketing faces today and how you can flip them into opportunities to get ahead.

1. Declining or Stagnant Engagement Rates

If you’ve experienced declining or stagnant engagement rates on your social media pages and posts, you’re not alone.

Falling engagement numbers are occurring across all platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

More importantly, these falling engagement numbers are affecting more than your own tracking and ROI. They continue to be a factor in many social media algorithms, determining which content is delivered to what users.

Use this engagement challenge as an opportunity to learn as much as you can about your audience and social media marketing. Here are suggestions on how to start.

Examine Your Current Social Media Results

Assess your current social media status, including what is working for you and what is not.

Assess top-performing posts for insight into what is driving more engagement with your audience.

Look for any connections between these, such as:

• Content types (Is video performing better than text?)
• Content themes
• Formatting
• Tone or Voice
• Post timing

By reviewing your content and its performance across all your social platforms, you can gain valuable audience insight and discern your content’s performance. Use what you learn to better focus your strategy.

Stay Alert to Industry and Consumer Trends

You can benefit from keeping up-to-date on industry and consumer trends, particularly when it comes to social media.

Doing so will save you time and some guesswork when it comes to understating what users are looking for and how they prefer to receive their information or entertainment.

Speak Directly to Your Existing Customers, Followers, and Online Communities

While you’re always seeking new followers, also spend a significant portion of your time and content marketing strategy speaking directly to your existing customers, followers, and online communities.

Potential ways to achieve this include:

• Interactive content, including polls or quizzes,
• Campaigns to increase user-generated content, and
• Continual monitoring and responding to comments and kudos from your existing customers and followers.

Collaborate With Influencers or Other Brands

To help improve engagement, consider ways to expand your reach, such as upping your influencer marketing efforts or collaborating with other brands.

An example of a route to take is to promote a cause that followers can link with your brand and also coincides with an influencer or other brand. Build a relationship and help each other expand the reach and entice more engagement.

2. Measuring Social Media Marketing ROI

Measuring and proving ROI of social media marketing efforts is a major challenge for users and brands of all sizes.

Yet, it’s also extremely important to make more efficient use of your marketing time and budget and also to report results to management and stakeholders.

Quantifiable or monetary goals remain easy to track. For example, how many sales occur due to a certain Facebook ad, the number of app downloads in a month’s time, or totals for newsletter sign-ups.

Yet, your goals are often more abstract, like boosting brand awareness. These are less easily measured or quantified when it comes to success, making proving ROI more difficult.

If you face this type of challenge, think of it as a perfect opportunity to determine what metrics to track so you can better measure and prove your ROI in the future.

The following metrics can help.

Engagements

Tracking engagements such as comments, saves, shares, and mentions is beneficial to show you where you are succeeding.

It shows you how your particular target audience engages with your content, helping you to track performance and improve future posts and campaigns.

Bounce Rates

Even if your social media content is leading consumers to your website, it’s important to know how long they stay. For example, a Facebook post may drive a lot of viewers to a particular page on your website, but if they leave within a few seconds, your bounce rate is going to be high.

If it is high, use it as a clue that your posts may not be relevant to that particular web page content. You don’t want to convince users to check your website only to have them find less than what was promised.

This can damage your reputation, and users may avoid you in the future regardless of what you post on social media.

Referral Traffic

Keep track of the amount of traffic coming from your chosen social media platforms by utilizing UTM parameters. Include these parameters on all links included in your social media accounts, campaigns, or individual posts.

Google Analytics can help you track these.

Sales

You can also directly track sales on certain social media platforms, like Instagram. By using the platform’s shoppable tags, you can track which purchases result directly from that platform.

Return on Advertising Spend

Return on Advertising Spend is a metric measuring the effectiveness of your digital advertising campaigns. With this information, you can evaluate what is working and how to improve your social media advertising for future campaigns.

3. Time Loss as the Result of Managing More than One Social Platform

Efficient use of your time is an important element of a successful strategy.

Time is money, and when building a social presence across more than one social media platform, you can easily experience a loss in productivity.

From juggling content deadlines, cross-posting, interacting with followers, assuring accurate messaging, sending notifications, and strategizing over what to post on each platform, your productivity can suffer if not managed efficiently.

If your productivity is declining, turn this challenge into an opportunity for developing, refining, or streamlining your social media marketing plan so you are more efficient. You can do this by:

Analyzing Each Platform

Determine the platforms that perform the best for you, and prioritize them according to that performance.

Start by looking for answers to the following questions:

• Where are the most meaningful engagements and growth occurring?
• Which platforms align more with your brand image, voice, and vision or goals?
• Where is your targeted audience? Which platform do they interact with the most?

As a result of your review, you may find you can do without one or two social media platforms. Focus on those that can provide you with the most benefits.

Use Online Social Media Management Tools

Consider using an online tool to help you consolidate, collaborate, and manage your social media accounts. This will provide you with one place to go and allow you to avoid jumping back and forth across platforms.

Consider Hiring Social Media Specialists

Taking on social media marketing yourself or sharing it with others is understandable if you are on your own or have a small business with limited staff available.

However, if possible, consider either outsourcing some of the tasks or hiring for specialized social media positions.

For example, you may need a social media marketing manager and/or coordinator to regularly monitor each platform and respond or interact with your community

4. Brand Voice Inconsistency

Brand voice is a crucial component of your business. It represents your brand’s personality and needs to be appealing to your target audience.

You also need to incorporate that brand voice into everything you do, including your social media content. That’s where a significant challenge can arise.

Too often, inconsistency in your brand voice reverberates across the social media platforms, causing confusion among your audience and failing to build trust, authority, recognition, and engagement with your brand.

That is not to say you should use the same content and formatting across all social media platforms you use. You still need to format and cater to the platform itself, but also find a way to maintain your brand voice when doing so.

If you are currently struggling with how to remain consistent in your brand voice across social media platforms, use the opportunity to create a long-term plan for your content going forward.

Two ways to help with this are to develop brand guidelines and create consistent brand messaging.

Brand Guidelines

Develop brand guidelines and share these with all team members, including any freelance writers and editors you work with regularly.

This guide will need to detail information pertaining to your brand voice, tone, and even word and graphic usage.

Brand Messaging

Maintain consistent brand messaging across all social media campaigns and content. This messaging may be attached to your business values or specific objectives and needs to remain consistent across all content.

5. Increase the Number of Customers Talking About Your Brand

While you may receive likes, what you really want is positive comments from your followers, customers, or targeted audience.

In particular, you want customer testimonials about how your product or service helped them. You want to get people talking about you and your brand on social media.

The challenge, however, is how to get those customers talking more about you and sharing their experiences.

The following may be able to help:

• Share feedback from customers (after asking their permission) as a social media post
• Ask customers directly for a review
• Provide excellent customer service
• Promptly respond to social media mentions and comments
• Create posts that ask for their opinions
• Sponsor contests or giveaways

Wrap Up: Use Social Media Challenges to Better Your Strategy Long-Term

Social media today continues to transform the way consumers communicate and how they interact with you or your brand. Along with this comes unique challenges that can make or break your marketing efforts.

Instead of fretting over how to conquer such challenges, start looking at them as opportunities to improve your strategy, jump ahead of the competition, and increase sales.

Accomplish this by finding ways to boost engagement, measure and prove ROI, improve efficiency, maintain brand voice and messaging, and keep customers sharing your brand with others.

Find more ways to ensure your marketing excels and stays ahead of the competition by incorporating these latest social media trends into your strategy.