Beyond the Reshare: Avoiding Common Mistakes for Smarter Social Media Engagement
Damon
Investing time and effort into creating compelling social media content is a significant undertaking. You carefully craft your message, select the right visuals, and hit publish, hoping to make an impact.
Yet, despite these efforts, many well-intentioned social media strategies fall short due to common, often subtle, strategic errors. It’s easy to get caught up in routines or assumptions that inadvertently hinder the reach and resonance of your content.
This guide aims to illuminate three prevalent pitfalls observed in social media marketing – mistakes that can stifle engagement, waste valuable content potential, and misalign efforts with true audience needs. By understanding these common errors and adopting more strategic alternatives, you can significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of your social media presence.
Mistake #1: The Tunnel Vision on Shares – Neglecting the Engagement Ecosystem
We've all likely seen or perhaps even participated in the familiar ritual: sending out messages to friends, colleagues, or network contacts with a polite request to "please share" a recent post. While seeking support for your content isn't inherently wrong, focusing exclusively on soliciting shares or retweets is a fundamentally limited and often suboptimal strategy.
Here's why this narrow focus is problematic:
Algorithms Value Diversity: Social media platforms utilise complex algorithms to determine content visibility. These algorithms don't just look at shares; they evaluate a wide spectrum of engagement signals. Likes, saves, meaningful comments, time spent viewing the content (dwell time), clicks, and yes, shares, all contribute to the assessment of a post's quality and relevance. Over-emphasising shares ignores the importance of this diverse engagement ecosystem. Platforms often give significant weight to genuine interactions, particularly thoughtful comments that spark further conversation, as these signal deeper engagement than a simple click-to-share.
The Burden of the Ask: Constantly asking your network to amplify your content can become burdensome. Sharing content directly to their own feeds is a more significant endorsement than a simple like or comment. Many individuals are understandably protective of their online presence and may be hesitant to frequently share promotional material or content that doesn't perfectly align with their own brand or audience, even if they support you personally.
Missed Opportunities for Deeper Interaction: Focusing solely on shares overlooks the potential for richer engagement. A thoughtful comment can initiate a valuable public conversation, provide social proof, and offer feedback, arguably contributing more to the post's vitality and algorithmic favour than a passive reshare.
The Smarter Approach: Broaden your perspective on valuable engagement and adjust your requests accordingly. Instead of solely asking for amplification, consider encouraging your network to leave a thoughtful comment if the topic resonates, or simply drop a 'like' if they appreciate the content. These actions are often easier for individuals to fulfil, feel less demanding, and contribute positively to the diverse engagement signals that platforms favour. Cultivating a range of interactions is healthier for visibility and fosters a more authentic sense of community around your content.
Mistake #2: The 'One and Done' Mentality – Forgoing Content Iteration
Another common inefficiency is treating each piece of social media content as a single-shot attempt. You create it, publish it, and regardless of its performance, immediately move on to the next new idea. This "one and done" approach fails to recognise the realities of social media consumption and misses significant opportunities to maximise the value of your content creation efforts.
Why iteration and re-testing are crucial:
Limited Organic Reach: The inherent nature of algorithmic feeds means only a small percentage of your followers typically see any individual organic post. Estimates vary by platform, but achieving even 20% reach to your follower base can be considered fortunate. This low visibility means that reposting a refined or reformatted version of your content later is unlikely to feel repetitive to the majority of your audience.
Fleeting Audience Attention: Social media feeds are incredibly crowded and fast-moving. Even if someone saw your post initially, the sheer volume of other content they consume means they are unlikely to recall it clearly weeks or even days later. Reposting tweaked content doesn't carry the risk of fatigue you might assume.
Diagnosing Underperformance: When a piece of content you believed had potential falls flat, the reason isn't always the core idea itself. It could be a weak opening hook, ineffective formatting (e.g., dense text that could be a visual), poor timing, or simply bad luck with the algorithm on that particular day. Giving up after one attempt means abandoning potentially valuable ideas prematurely.
The Smarter Approach: Embrace experimentation and iteration as core components of your social media workflow. If a post containing a solid idea underperforms, don't discard it immediately. Instead, diagnose potential weaknesses and test variations. Could the opening sentence be more compelling? Can the key message be presented more visually, perhaps as an image carousel or a short video with text overlays? Could minor edits improve clarity or impact? Revisit, refine, reformat, and republish. This iterative process allows you to learn what resonates, extract more value from your content ideas, and ultimately makes your content creation efforts more sustainable and effective. Think of it less as repetition and more as optimisation.
Mistake #3: The Internal Echo Chamber – Addressing Peers Instead of Prospects
A subtle but significant error occurs when content creation drifts away from serving the intended external audience and instead becomes focused on impressing industry insiders, engaging in internal company rivalries, or simply talking about topics in a way only colleagues would understand.
While establishing credibility within your professional peer group has its place, if your primary goal on social media is customer acquisition, brand building, or stakeholder communication, your content must prioritise the needs and perspectives of your target audience.
The disconnect arises because what resonates with industry peers (e.g., technical jargon, niche debates, internal company happenings) is often irrelevant, confusing, or uninteresting to potential customers, journalists, analysts, or other key external stakeholders.
Posting internal jokes, airing competitive grievances publicly, or sharing overly technical details without context can alienate the very audience you aim to attract. This is especially critical when posting from official company accounts, where maintaining a professional, audience-focused voice is paramount. The obvious exception is when your peers are your primary target audience, such as in certain B2B or niche community contexts.
The Smarter Approach: Maintain a relentless focus on your defined target audience. Before creating any piece of content, ask: "Who is this for, and what value does it provide to them?" To ensure your content aligns with audience needs and interests, employ systematic research methods:
Understand Information Demand via Search Insights: Utilise keyword research tools and search trend analysis to identify the topics, questions, and problems your audience is actively searching for online. Creating content that addresses this existing demand increases its relevance and discoverability.
Listen Actively in Relevant Online Spaces: Identify the online communities, forums, groups, or platforms where your target audience congregates. Monitor the conversations, observe the language used, note recurring questions or frustrations, and identify key influencers or thought leaders. This "social listening" provides direct insight into their current preoccupations and pain points. Use dedicated tools for broader trend analysis and competitive monitoring if resources allow.
Conduct Broader Audience Research: Go beyond online conversations to understand your audience's wider context. What publications do they read? Which podcasts do they listen to? What are their professional goals or personal interests outside of your immediate niche? Methods like direct customer interviews, surveys, or utilising specialised audience intelligence platforms can provide a richer, more holistic understanding of their world, enabling you to create more deeply resonant content.
Sharpening Your Social Media Strategy
The path to effective social media marketing is paved with continuous learning and refinement. By consciously avoiding these common pitfalls – the myopic focus on shares, the reluctance to iterate on content, and the tendency to speak to insiders rather than the intended audience – you can significantly sharpen your strategy.
Embracing a broader view of engagement, adopting an experimental and iterative approach to content, and grounding your topics firmly in audience research will lead to more efficient use of resources, greater content resonance, deeper audience connections, and ultimately, more impactful results from your social media endeavours.