While social media marketing is a changing game factor for internet marketing, brand exposure, and marketing in general, perhaps too much of it may be its own worst enemy. Social media now has 210 platforms and networking sites, and of these, 15 alone have virtual communities greater than 100 million users. It is a massive market, but social media marketers should realize that it is fragmented.

A simple solution is a social media strategy focusing on the ideal niche market that fits your desired business objectives. You need to carefully select the social media platforms for the business or brand based on audience alignment, customer interactions and feedback, and other factors fed through the customers.

However, a real social media strategy must realize that what works for one social media platform does not apply to another. Twitter hashtags only work on Twitter, while constant quality content must always be fed into Facebook. You can’t hashtag on Facebook, and you can’t put content on Twitter. What works with sharing content in one network may not work in another. Customers know this, so they look for content that suits them or their niche. What works best is something created for a specific platform, and trying to force content on a platform for something else will not cut it.

Align Your Business Objectives

If, for example, the business objective is to sell a specific consumer product, getting fixated on Twitter or its retweets is not the sensible marketing thing to do. It may contribute in a way, but it doesn’t serve what should be something straightforward, such as truly advertising the product to a specific niche target market.

This type of marketing paradigm can be traced back to the days of traditional marketing, wherein it made sense to market better during the so-called “prime time,” and that is why most advertising is done on TV or radio during these times. This “shotgun method” of hitting the target found its way into early internet marketing through e-mail marketing and later through search engine optimization (SEO). This misconception might be a trap even for those doing social media strategy by focusing more on counting shares, likes, and retweets rather than on coupon and discount downloads, website visitors and interactions, and page conversions.

Don’t Over-Content with Social Media Marketing.

Another mistake is adding humorous content to attract your page or product attention. The question is whether the humorous content is connected to the product. If it has no connection whatsoever and will not contribute one iota to your business objective, then don’t post it. All content should be in conjunction with your business objectives. The same goes for so-called updated content based on news and other trends. Even subtle topics like news, politics, disasters, etc., that have no connection to the product should be left out. Let’s face the fact that if your product is peanut butter, then it makes no sense to post about the presidential elections on your product page.