Social media is the new sensation in the marketing world. Every marketer across various industries wants to try his / her hand at it. Companies are leaving no stone unturned to leverage it. The likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are brimming with content such as videos, graphics and text. Marketers are pushing to create brand images and penetrating audience territories earlier considered inaccessible. Everyone everywhere seems to be catching the same train but if you don’t know where the train is headed, you will never be able to reach your destination. 

 

And this is exactly what is happening with social media marketing. Marketers are entering the fray without a clear understanding of what they wish to achieve. Social media marketing is fraught with challenges thereby leaving underprepared marketers overwhelmed, frustrated and confused. 

 

What are these challenges of social media marketing? One of the biggest challenges that marketers face is connecting with the audience and capturing their attention. Just being active on social media is not marketing. Brand and companies have to make their presence felt. This requires producing content constantly that is not just good quality but also creative and original. Having quality visuals and graphics are important for success on social media. But just having good content will not be sufficient. The next challenge is to promote the content and reach out to the right audience instead of waiting for them to reach out to you. Developing good content and promoting it requires skill and can be very time-consuming. This can be daunting especially, for smaller businesses.

 

Most marketers believe that they have a social media marketing strategy in place if they know the company’s marketing goals, the relevant social channels to achieve those goals and the expectation from the audience who view content on those channels. If you think this is enough, think again!

 

If marketers don’t plan minutely, they are doomed to fail. Marketers need to have a plan for something as small as when is the best time to tweet. Because tweeting at 9 am Los Angeles time won’t necessarily render the same results if your customer base is in London. Some questions like - are you prepared to educate your staff on how to use social media, how much time can you devote, and how to manage negative feedback about your business, should be a part of the social media marketing strategy. It can be quite challenging to prepare a comprehensive strategy for social media marketing considering the social platforms are constantly evolving.

 

But by far, social media measurement remains the biggest problem for social media marketers. Most are left stumped to questions like how to measure effectiveness of social media campaigns, which metrics to monitor, how to calculate those metrics, and how to interpret those numbers once they become available.  

 

Marketing on social media is relatively new and even the so called ‘gurus of social media marketing’ are learning through trials and errors. So send up a trial balloon to see what is working in your social media strategy, what isn’t and how you can improve.