8 common mistakes marketers make when connecting with customers via social media

"Establish strong bonds with your customers”—this is the most common tip any business gets when starting a profile on social media for their brands. Yes, first impressions matter, but how to do it right? 

You can find lots of advice on how to strengthen customer relationships online or in respected publishing like the ‘Bible of Marketing Communication’ or ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ Yet, they might not provide many solutions. Why? Because while knowing what you SHOULD do is great, you also need to know what you SHOULDN’T when addressing your customers. 

Empowered with valuable knowledge on what to avoid in your customer communication will allow you to eliminate textbookish methods and help create more natural conversations. Being caught in the whirlpool of massive adverts and polished marketing campaigns, genuine talk is something modern consumers are really missing and value. 

Here are our top 8 useful tips on what mistakes to avoid to make your brand conversations natural and engaging. 

#1 Talking too much about you

The time when brands had one-way conversations with their buyers over a radio or a newspaper has passed. Nevertheless, some companies persistently keep using “TV-style talk”—they don’t listen to their customers but they talk, excessively talk about themselves. They explain who they are, what their values are, why their product is the best, and a lot more.

But, there’s a catch: hardly any customer will believe how good their products are, knowing that any business today has an entire marketing department aimed at presenting their products and brands in the best light. 

So, how can you make your brand and product appealing to your followers and potential buyers? The answer is simple—don’t talk much, listen first, and understand your customers' pain points. Then, try to address their wants and needs in friendly conversations, comments, or even jokes, eliminating all those flashy marketing presentations with lengthy monologues.

#2 Offering no value just sales

There are different ways you can sell your products on social media. The simplest and straightforward is to sell directly in adverts. This method can generate some leads over the short term. However, it won’t let you sell much as your buyers won’t form a strong bond with your brand. 

A better way of selling is by offering something of value to your potential buyers. This approach involves several simple steps:

The second approach will help you establish closer relationships with your audience, offer the most valuable and relevant content, and, therefore, sell more effectively and through longer periods of time.

#3 Misusing best practices and templates

A joke repeated twice becomes less funny, and a marketing gimmick repeated by an army of marketers becomes banal and cliched. Try to avoid the same mistake in your customer relationship management.

For example, the phrases like: “Huge savings”, “Keep calm and [insert your verb]”, “Next level”, “We do [insert what you do], so you don’t have to”, “Best-of-breed”, “World class”, “[Insert your number] people can’t be wrong” have been used so many times that catch the eye of any experienced online buyer and also get included in every list of cliches to avoid on any decent website about marketing. 

Meanwhile, “Belong anywhere”, “Move the way you want”, “Do what you can’t”, “Just do it”, and many others are recognizable and associated with major brands. Simple, but oh-so-effective. You can also try to create unique content for your customers to show your product and brand authenticity and difference.

The rule of cliches isn’t limited only to words that you shouldn’t use in your social media messaging, it could also relate to social media marketing campaign techniques, visual design, and other marketing and PR instruments.

A great example video on visual design cliches: The world's most hated art style.

#4 Overpromising results

Customer disappointment. What could be worse for marketers when they try to establish trustworthy communication with their audience? No marketer in their right mind would aspire to worsen their relationships with their buyers and followers. So, why does overpromising that sets so many customers at odds with brands still happen in the world of marketing? There are several reasons for that:

The negative result of overpromising can be really shocking for a company’s brand reputation. Word of mouth quickly spreads around social media and if a company fails to neutralize a reputation crisis at its early stage, it can become international or even worse–get into the “Top Worst Marketing Failures of All Times” book and be recorded in history. But seriously, the reputation crisis usually leads to a quickly increasing churn rate, loss of income, risk of closure, and other hardships.

How to avoid overpromising? There are some steps you could do to keep your business away from it:

#5 Being too pushy

Even if you create outstanding promoting content for your social media, too much advertising can be harmful to your brand. Social media followers tend to quickly get tired of massive promos and to minimize the number of ads, some can spend a couple of minutes to find out where the “Unsubscribe” button is.

To minimize the ads' annoying effect, you can make three important steps:

#6 Hearing but not listening

Marketers are continuously striving to make their brands super-polished and appealing. Being brand-centered, they can completely forget to listen to their audiences and find out their followers' opinions. As a result, the brand starts speaking to itself, while the number of leads keeps falling as well as the audience engagement.

How to turn your brand from a passive listener that only registers followers’ activity on their social media page into an active listener and conversation participator? One of the effective ways to do so is to use social media listening tools such as Awario. 

Awario can simply help businesses discover their customers’ concerns, desires, and needs. It swiftly gathers the latest tweets and posts on the industry and brand-related issues, unveiling customer thoughts, and opinions to businesses. Moreover, with Awario’s assistance, businesses can quickly track negative tendencies such as peevish feedback or irritated customer queries practically in real-time. This way, businesses can quickly fix the issues and prevent the brand crisis at its very inception. 

Awario dashboard with negative sentiment spike

#7 Ignoring customer data

Customers can provide your business with tons of valuable data from how your brand performs on a social media platform to new ideas for posting and marketing campaigns. However, to gather all this knowledge manually, scrolling through media news feeds, or entering business data on various platforms can be a real nightmare. That’s why lots of marketers use various analytics tools for quick insights, instead.

Awario dashboard: top influencers and top mentions widget

You can also create your own set of analytics tools to get the most informative and detailed data from several social media platforms and compare your brand performance to them. For example, you can use:

#8 Building brand/customer healthy relationships

Any healthy person-to-person relationship is based on respect. The same rule can easily apply to brand-consumer interaction. When a brand and a customer converse as equals and treat each other as individuals there won’t be any communication distortions.

However, sometimes brands in their attempt to position themselves in the market use a parent-to-child communication style. Explaining to your audience what they want and talking at them, not to them is one of the worst techniques marketers can use. That’s why brands need a well-elaborated tone and personality before going to social media.

Before you go… 

Building strong and long-lasting relationships with audiences is one of the most challenging tasks that marketers can face. When they manage to do an excellent job this results in a quickly growing number of followers on social media, increasing revenues, and growing popularity. 

To connect to their customers successfully, lots of marketers use various marketing tools such as Google Analytics and Awario to learn more about their audiences and, therefore, create more relevant content as well as better cater to their followers’ wants and needs