Social Media Challenges

1) Organic Reach

Every year we see organic reach dwindle away, especially for social media platforms are pushing brands to adapt their advertising solutions. To tackle the issue of organic reach, you can start investing heavily in paid ads, but if it’s not feasible for you at the moment, you can adopt the following 2 strategies:
Choose Quality Over Quantity: Have a consistent posting frequency, but you do not need to post every blog post you publish. Post only the ace content as this would increase better engagement with organic reach.
Focus on the Trending Content Format: There will always be a few content formats that will be trending for a specific time period. A few years back, it was ‘images’. In 2018, videos are outperforming the other formats. Therefore, use videos to get noticed in your followers’ news feed.

2) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a widely used strategy because it is cost-effective compared to mainstream advertising, and generates great returns on your ad spend. However, there are a few challenges that come with influencer marketing. Let’s look at 3 main challenges and how you can solve them:

Getting the Best Influencers for Your Brand: You need to find influencers with authority in your niche and with followers who are similar to your target audience. To find out the influencers who will bring value, use tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Followerwonk, Buzzsumo, and Buzzstream, to name a few.
Deciding the Creative Freedom: Ultimately it’s the content that resonates with your audience. You need to understand that influencers know more about their followers. Therefore, it’s beneficial to offer a certain level of creative freedom to the influencers, in terms of content. You can do it by giving a creative brief to influencers and some templates around which they can draft the copies.
Measuring the Impact: Measuring the ROI of digital avenues has been a perennial problem for marketers, and influencer programs are no different. To measure the results of the influencer campaign, start tracking reach, impressions, engagement, and conversions. To measure conversions, you can start giving out promo codes unique for each influencer so that you can track the performance of each individual.

3) Follower Engagement

What is the point of social media if no one is there to listen to what you have to say? Building a community on social media is a challenge. Keeping them engaged is an even bigger challenge. Remember, social media is a two-way street. Here are 3 simple ways you can boost follower engagement:

Ask Questions: The simplest tactic you can use is to ask questions. Ask questions to get feedback, know what your followers think about a particular trend, or just about anything related to your topic. You can ask your followers to leave comments or use the in-built poll feature most platforms provide. Here’s an example:
Ask Questions to get feedback

Solve Customer Queries Promptly: Whenever a user tweets or posts on your page with a query, try to address it as quickly as possible. Doing this will build trust and encourage the user to interact with your brand more frequently.

Run Contests: Asking your followers to participate in a contest by tweeting with a hashtag or commenting or sharing your content by offering freebies in return is a relatively low effort activity for both, your brand and your followers to skyrocket your engagement.

4) Immersive Content Formats

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are still in a nascent stage in their marketing adaptation, but that’s where their biggest potential lies. The biggest challenge with the immersive content format is its low adoption rate. If you use Facebook you might come across Facebook 360 videos, but they too are few. Also, devices required for immersive content formats like VR headsets are still not in the trend yet. As the saying goes, “the early bird gets the worm.” The way to overcome this is to become an early adopter in the field so that when this format finally explodes, you will be there to bank on its success.

5) Consistent Brand Voice

Brand voice is the personality of your brand. It needs to be engaging, and it should be reflected in your content. Lack of long-term content planning is what stifles the consistency in your brand voice. Also, being unable to convey your voice through the content hampers the communication. To overcome these challenges, you need to start with having a brand guide that details your voice, tone, word usage, dos, and don’ts, etc.

Also, while creating content or a campaign for a specific business requirement, keep the messaging constant and repeat it wherever you can to build a lasting impact.

Lastly, although consistency is crucial, keep your brand voice young, witty and impactful. Understand your audience well and adopt a language that echoes their thoughts, attitude, and lifestyle. Change is inevitable in social media marketing. The best way to overcome new challenges is to stick to the fundamental – content!