Three Mistakes No Social Media Manager Wants to Make
No comment & engagement pods -they will only make your life harder
Engagement pods once were a somewhat-reliable option when attempting to “beat” a long-gone version of the algorithm, but haven’t been an effective (and never an ethical!) engagement strategy for a very long time. We know that social media users see content in their feeds based on THEIR activity, not the activity of other users, so getting friends, family, and other businesses to agree to comment on posts as soon as they are posted makes no sense.
Unless what you are trying to do is convince your client that your content drives lots of engagement…which you wouldn’t do right, because it’s dishonest 🧐
Creating false engagement for your clients is a risky game that will backfire on you once your comment/engagement pod has better things to do…. how do you explain to a client that their results this month are down because your friends were out of town and unable to comment on their posts?
Unless your social media besties are going to become paying customers and buy what your client has to offer, leave them out of your work.
No social media strategy - no can do!
All social media managers will have experienced the client who just wants someone to “do their socials” and doesn’t really want to invest in anything other than the lowest possible weekly or monthly management fee.
But what happens when the client expectations are greater than what you can deliver without a solid strategy in place?
Time and time again I see social media managers deliver the strategy component for free, in an effort to keep a client happy.
It’s a tricky one as many clients - especially small business clients - may not understand the value of social media strategy and be hesitant to invest in it.
What to do instead? Always articulate the value of having strategy in place - and either build strategy into your monthly prices OR as a one off first month fee. But stop giving it away for free!
Not staying on top of platform changes - what worked today might not work tomorrow!
Facebook announced way back in 2017 that it was going to penalise business users who were participating in engagement bait. Yet many brands and social media managers persist in asking users to Share, Like or Comment, or ask their followers to use react emojis…it’s not 2012 and this type of social media marketing is lazy at best, and at worst risks tanking your client’s reach. Don't get me started on rules for giveaways and competitions.
In 2021 the Instagram Creators account shared that posts should only be using 3-5 hashtags and using more did not increase distribution (reach).
And in 2022 the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri answered a question in his IG stories about hashtags increasing reach, to which he replied that hashtags did not increase distribution and were more useful for indexing or potentially appearing on the explore page.
It’s a lot right!
So many things can change in the social media world and if you’re managing client accounts you want to stay on top of your game - and you want to keep clients expectations in line with the reality of being on social media… that things will change without notice, and the approach may have to change too.
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