How to Solve Common Social Media Marketing Challenges: A Quick Guide

Social media marketing might seem simple at the outset, but can be quite challenging once you actually learn the nuances.

Most popular social media platforms have millions of users, a good share of which are businesses. The growing number of brands, marketers, and influencers on social media make it a highly competitive environment.

Moreover, there are many other challenges that marketers face that stops them from increasing their reach and strengthen their presence on social media. In this post, we will discuss seven such social media marketing challenges and ways to overcome them.

So, let’s get started.

1. Connect with the Audience

The most common social media marketing challenge that marketers face is a failure to connect with their audience. You can create good content and follow all the rules of social media marketing, but it is of no use if you can’t connect with your target audience.

This does not refer to the number of followers, as you can gain those by using different tips and tricks. This is more about how many people actually like and engage with your brand.

Solution:

To overcome this challenge, you need to gain audience insights and understand their likes and preferences. You can use social media monitoring to accomplish this. All you have to do is use tools to listen to social media conversations around your brand.

Another way to gain audience insights is to leverage the built-in social media analytics tools on each platform where you are active.

Once you have these insights, you can create targeted content that resonates with your target audience. This will help you attract, engage, and retain loyal followers on social media.

2. Increasing Reach

The most difficult part of social media marketing is to increase your reach and ensure that relevant people find your account. If you are new to social media, this can be especially challenging.

Solution:

The easiest and most effective way to overcome this initial hurdle is to invest in social media advertising. This can instantly help you reach a larger and more targeted audience. Once you have gained enough followers, you can stop this.

To increase your organic reach, you can use hashtags and keywords in your social media captions, bio, etc. It works on a similar principle as SEO, but for social media.

3. Manage Multiple Accounts

Most businesses choose at least 2 different social media platforms to gain access to a larger audience or different target audience. Having multiple social media accounts also helps you to cross-promote content.

However, managing multiple social media accounts can be daunting, especially if you have to do it all by yourself.

Solution:

You can easily solve this problem by investing in tools to manage social media accounts. These can help you plan, schedule, and post all your social media content from a single dashboard.

Some of these tools can also help you find relevant hashtags and respond to comments/messages quickly and easily.

4. Improve Audience Engagement

This is in addition to the first point on connecting with your audience. You can use targeted content to attract and amaze your target audience with your content, but then what?

You need to ensure that they stay connected and engaged. After all, people tend to lose interest after a while, unless you do something to keep them engaged. This is where many social media marketers fail.

The focus should not just be on reaching more people but also interacting with and engaging your existing followers.

Solution:

When it comes to social media content, there are certain types of content that are more interactive and engaging. Polls, quizzes, and contests—for example—can instantly get your audience’s attention and provide them with a chance to interact with your brand.

Similarly, hosting regular live video sessions allows your audience to ask questions and interact with you in real-time. You can also design your posts in a way that they spark a conversation or ask people to comment.

5. Create Visual Social Media Posts

If you believe in creating your posts instead of reposting, then you must know how difficult it can be to design visual posts every day. And, unless you have awesome design skills, it is rather difficult to create visual posts from scratch.

Moreover, even if you have the required skills, it still takes considerable time and effort. You can hire a specialist for this, but that is an unnecessary expense that you can avoid.

Solution:

Use free social media templates to create visually-appealing and engaging social media posts within minutes. There are numerous social media design tools in the market that offer either a trial or at least a few free templates. All you have to do is create your free account and start using it.

Here’s an example of free social media post templates from Crello.

6. Find Fresh Content Ideas Daily

To maintain a strong social media presence, you need to post content frequently and consistently.

Popular platforms like Instagram and Facebook require posting content daily to ensure that your content stays at the top of your followers’ feeds. Some platforms like Twitter are more dynamic and it is advisable to post more frequently on it.

However, creating fresh content for each platform and posting it at the required frequency can be difficult.

Solution:

Use content curation tools to find the best content on your preferred topics and repost it from your social media accounts. Content curation is the best way to engage your audience with good content, without having to create new content every day.

7. Encourage Social Sharing

One way to increase your social media reach is to encourage your followers to share your content. You can think of this as the free version of influencer marketing.

When followers share your content, it helps you reach their followers. If their followers like that content, then they might check out the original post and follow your account.

However, getting your followers to share your content is not easy.  People will share your content only if they like it and find it shareworthy.

Solution:

Create shareworthy content by understanding what resonates with your audience and which types of content gets shared the most.

You can take care of the first part through detailed audience research. For the latter, here is a list of the types of content that get shared most:

• News – Anything new or trending in your niche that people would love hearing about.
• Memes – One of the most shared types of social media content is memes. Funny, witty, sarcastic memes add a dose of laughter to people’s days and they love to share them with their friends and family.
• Tips, Tricks, Hacks – Crisp and actionable tips on topics in your niche can make people want to share it and sound like experts.
• Cute Animal Pictures/Videos – Add a cute animal visual to any of your content and your audience will not only love it but also share it.

Here’s an example of one of the most retweeted (shared) tweets of all time. It is a series of pictures of Ryan Sesselman with a dog that got retweeted over a million times.

Conclusion

These are some of the most common social media marketing challenges that you can face. Hopefully, these social media tips will help you overcome these challenges and succeed in your social media marketing initiatives.

Have any questions regarding the social media challenges that you are facing? Leave a comment.

About the author

Gaurav Sharma is the Founder of Attrock, a digital marketing company. He works closely with top marketing influencers and has helped numerous brands, ecommerce firms, and SaaS companies grow.

He is also a certified Google Analytics and Google Adwords specialist and regularly contributes to reputable publications like HuffPost, TechCrunch, and many more.

You can get in touch on Instagram or LinkedIn