6 Social Media Marketing Challenges which Businesses face
With every new social media platform being launched, the roles are changing and customer demands are evolving with it, creating and then maintaining an efficient and effective social media content strategy across the board is necessary but it is never easy.
In fact, it is highly challenging.
Let’s dig into the top 6 most challenging factors of Social Media Marketing which companies face once or time to time. But if you are letting a competitive social media marketing company run your campaigns, you might not have to deal with these factors at all.
Choosing between a global & local strategy
Understanding how to manage and maintain social media strategy across multiple countries requires in-depth and careful planning.
The biggest factor which companies need to consider is whether to go for a global or local strategy. Applying a strategy which suits all markets is not usually a go-to solution, the best solution can be extremely difficult to figure out.
While one company takes advantage from a global strategy where sequence across all social channels will be guaranteed – on the other hand, one marketing team might find it more productive to relate the product or service with the locals as their services/products resonate with them more accurately.
If a global marketing team tries to implement a campaign on a local scale, the risk of messing up and blunders because of lack of cultural understanding is always high.
For a lot of companies, finding and hiring a local in-house marketing team is preferable as they understand the segments related to local mindsets.
Take the most appropriate example of Starbucks. Through its numerous regional channels, it manages to bring together its core values as a brand with local and contextually crafted messages for a particular audience.
Maintaining brand reputation
It’s an intimidating prospect to hold a brand’s overall reputation in your hands. However, for anyone tweeting, posting or uploading a blog on behalf of an organization, this is more often the reality.
As this is the responsibility of many stakeholders’ shoulders – from experienced editors to inexperienced social media executives – it is important that brands set up explicit guidelines for all employees to follow.
Naturally, this itself is an extremely difficult task to execute.
Having clear rules can simply mean the difference between a funny post and a downright offensive one.
Resolving issues
Whereas to-the-point brand guidelines can assist to prevent social media blunders, no brand can guarantee that an audience won’t take something as an offense – even if that is completely unintentional.
In such a case, the difficulty for Social Media strategists is to craft a response to such feedback.
For many brands, the ability to use Twitter as a customer service/care source can lead to knee-jerk reactions.
However, this can easily get out of control. If you reply to one tweet or comment, you will surely feel obliged to reply to all, which gradually leads to a loss of credibility and reputation.
A very appropriate example of how to overcome such a situation like this is restaurant chain GBK.
Due to an advertisement campaign using numerous slogans like “resistance is futile” and “they eat grass so you don’t have to”, the brand received angry tweets from its vegetarian customers.
However, instead of going out for an instant and defensive reaction, the brand decided to wait, plan and eventually issue an appropriate and humble response.
Ensuring consistency and conversation
The temptation to use social media platforms solely as a broadcasting platform is beyond enticement.
While promoting products or services is an important part of a brand’s strategy, content is both relevant and demanded is vital.
Instead of continuous self-promotion, the concerning challenge for companies is to be able to create content that reflects the accurate brand values and nature, as well as encourages interaction.
Along with this, an ongoing posting calendar and confident voice are similarly important when it comes down to keeping an audience engaged.
A good example of a brand that is successful on social media platforms is a diaper brand Pampers.
Knowing and understanding the potential to create a brand community, it uses the social media platforms as an engaging place for parents to engage with each other and interact with the brand as well.
By crafting engaging hashtags to ignite fruitful conversations and using original abbreviations like ‘LO’ (little one), it has managed to preserve its own unique style and one that links with its target audience.
The continuing decline of organic reach
On YouTube and Facebook, monthly users are over one billion, while bio for Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are in the hundreds of millions. A staggering amount of content is produced by each of these social media channels. To keep users on the platform and engaged, social media channels use algorithms to screen out junk and show the most relevant and interesting content to the user.
While people welcome an interesting feed, the algorithm can be and usually is frustrating for digital marketers. Over the last few years, we’ve all witness our reach drop significantly, despite healthy and growing audiences/reach.
In the very early days of social media, when someone used to follow your brand’s page, they would see your posts —but that has changed drastically. Because of the traffic on social media channels, your posts can be lost, deprioritized, or fails to gain traction.
Creating an effective cross-channel strategy
If you’re making a strategy to increase your organic reach, you must already be optimizing your content by social media channel. Pushing your content across many social media platforms/channels and making it work within the channel is a great skill for a social media strategist or manager.
Multiplatform strategies can be challenging and difficult to manage because each channel has its own formats and tone-set that describes how your content should fit in. Additionally, your target audience has their own preferences and platform usage habits, and will usually consult different channels [social presence] while getting to know about your company.
Each of these social channels works together in synergy creates a collective brand impression against your audience’s social behavior.
It does not matter how hard you work at social media, there’s always more that requires your keen attention. Organizing a brand’s social week based on what can be shared and what needs specific attention has always been the simplest way I know to get things done.
For example, if I list my top 3 responsibilities in the same way as I report them to the company each week, they could be:
I spend time on my calendar for engagement, usually number one thing in the morning, and leave time vacant after lunch for engagements and research. I work on a growing audience in a few tasks based on multiple analytics sources. Since the content creation and the discussions around content takes up the biggest chunk of my time, I share this particular task with my team in a content calendar.
Creating a content calendar gives everyone centralized access, lets us brainstorm, collaborate, and then allows us to achieve more independently. Without the centralization, I am being questioned about everything that is related to the calendar and I hardly find it productive or something that should happen at all.
As social media marketers, I think it’s necessary to let technology work for us and we must utilize it efficiently to get the best out of our workdays and avoid rabbit-holes. In 2018 and beyond, you won’t be able to do this job without a digital content calendar.
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