Struggling to get engagement on your social media channels? While social media is well-liked by marketers for its impactful tools to reach out to audiences affordably, it is understandable that companies are actively using it to promote their brands. Although social media has become a must-have in the marketer’s toolkit, many are still prone to crucial mistakes, which we will cover below: 

Mistake #1: Being too Wordy

Capturing the attention of new customers and existing clients on social media is not easy. Long-winded and cluttered content causes your audience to be bored, confused, or lose interest. It is crucial to have short, straight-to-the-point content that presents your main point. 

Tip – How to be Succinct with your Content

Include key product terms that highlight your company’s offerings, features or benefits. Use prominent phrases to be clear on the objective of the post. Finally, guide customers to your intended call-to-action! This can be a shortened bit.ly link, sending a message to the page, or even picking up the phone!

Mistake #2: Inappropriate Font Types

Fonts are the key highlight of a brand’s personality. Although it is not as prominent as visuals, professional fonts help to shape how consumers perceive the brand. Using unprofessional fonts causes consumers to form a non-professional impression of the brand and is less likely to take it seriously. 

Tip – How to Determine if a Font is Professional

Generally, web-safe fonts include Helvetica, Playfair Display, Merriweather, Montserrat, Open Sans and Roboto. This is especially so if you are involved in website work too.

In general, avoid anything else that is too bold, cursive or may appear unprofessional to the eye. Some examples include Comic Sans, Times New Roman and Impact. 

Mistake #3: Mismanaging Colour Schemes 

Often, companies design social media content without much thought to picking the right colours or worse, inconsistent colour schemes, that will end up confusing customers. The right colours should reflect the goal and brand personality of your company.

Tip – Apply Colour Theory To Your Social Media Strategy

To summarise, there are five different types of colour theories. 

• Complementary colour schemes are suitable for a basic design. With a high contrast colour combination, it helps bring out the message well and is attractive to the eye. 
• Analogous colour schemes unify your design to bring a more centric message to the audience. It is made up of adjacent colours and does not have much contrast.
• Triadic colour schemes are three colours of equal distances on the colour wheel. It promotes a softer contrast yet prominent to the eye design to your consumers.   
• Split Complementary colour scheme adds depth by picking two neighbouring colours on either side of the base colour. If used correctly, it can provide a more profound value. However, due to the depth and complexity of the colours, it can make the design appear less vibrant and eye-catching.
•  Tetradic colour scheme has the same concept as triadic, where tetradic is a combination of four colours with the exact symmetry where the colours are of equal distances. It presents itself to look vibrant and eye-catching.

Mistake #4: Being Too Flat With Copywriting

Be it the graphics or the caption, copywriting and the use of linguistics are vital to capture the attention of your targeted audience. To attract as much attention as possible, consider using emotive language and creativity in crafting your message are important ways to bring your point out. 

Tip – Get Creative on Social Media

Go wild and be slightly cheeky! Wordplay, metaphors, and more have garnered more attention than a simple factual caption about your product or service. 

Mistake #5: Wrong Use of Hashtags

Marketers know that hashtags can drive traffic and attention towards a post. However, mindless use of hashtags, such as putting over 25 hashtags per post, or repeating them on almost the same theme, can make the post unauthentic. No customer likes to engage with a brand that looks like a spam page! Using irrelevant hashtags might also limit engagement and brand image. 

Tip – Using Hashtags the Right Way

Finding a unique hashtag that only your brand holds helps to bring brand awareness when an audience clicks on that specific hashtag. It directs their attention to all the posts you have done relating to your company’s work. Using common hashtags can also make your brand discoverable on popular topics. Hashtags should also be simple, short to the point. Overly long hashtags distract audiences, only scrolling away from the posts. 

Good Example:

Bad Example:

Mistake #6: Poor Quality Visuals 

Posts with relevant visuals see up to 650% increase in engagement compared to text-only posts. This makes choosing an appropriate image or visual effect all the more important, on top of the content that your brand is trying to put across.

As customers, our first impression of a brand is more often than not affected by the visuals. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. A well-picked visual theme drives engagement, and thus brand affinity. 

Tip – How to Pick a Suitable Visual

Any good visual has these qualities: high-quality, tailored content relevant to the post and emphasising the main message. 

Text visuals should be readable, bold for emphasis, straightforward and succinct. 

When picking the best form of visual, take a look at your target audience.

If your target audience are businesses, opt for text visuals with a plain yet outstanding background that brings out the point of the text. As for B2B, promoting informative content is the most important part of the post. 

While for B2C, graphics and illustrations that are visually appealing are the best. To grab the attention of the consumers, it is important to pick a visual that is colourful, bright and brings consumer’s attention to the main aim of the social media post. 

Mistake #7: Not Using Social Media Link To Drive Traffic

Social media content can lower engagement rates without relevant links to engage consumers to discover more about the company. Facebook allows clickable links to be placed in the caption, while Instagram works better if the link is in the bio. It is good to throttle between posts with and without links to not overwhelm your audiences with too many distractions. 

Tip – Organising Links 

If you have multiple links you would like to share with your followers on Instagram, use link services like Linktree and Link in Profile. It keeps your links organised in one place and makes it easy for followers to look into your business. Remember to keep to the same colour scheme when designing your link services!

Bonus Tips! – Increasing Human Touch

First, to create a more intimate relationship with your users, encourage them to submit content that your page can use. An emotional human bond formed between the audience and the brand, mutual trust, support and respect can be built. 

To be more ‘human’, put down your defences and reply to your comments on your page, tagged posts and direct messages. Kickstart a conversation. On top of that, testimonials and recommendations show authenticity by generating empathy. 

Consumer-Tailored Content for your Brand 

By avoiding these seven mistakes, you are on your way to curating social media content relevant to your audience’s needs. Start curating your content now.

If you like the idea of preventing such mistakes from taking over your engagement, reaching out to marketing firms is an option too. At Growth.sg, we help you to tailor your brand, offer services to design a well-rounded social media presence.