An ideal marketing strategy is composed of different marketing actions, integrated together to form an effective, and efficient way of meeting goals, boosting sales, and improving brand awareness. Unfortunately, not every business owners are good at integrating their marketing strategies.

One of the common mistakes they commit is how they use their social media sites, especially when integrated with content marketing plans. The moment business owners realized that social media is a trend in digital marketing, they just easily jump into the band-wagon without any knowledge of what they are doing.

Without proper knowledge about social media they can either make plenty of mistakes that would damage their business, or they won’t maximize the potential of their business. Combine it with another popular strategy like content marketing, and digital marketing becomes more complicated.

If you are a business owner thinking of integrating social media and content marketing with your business strategy, you should watch out for these mistakes that might hinder your business goals.

Share not just blogs, infographics are equally effective

A common mistake that even professional marketers do is to share only blogs on their social media accounts. Content marketing is not limited to blogs, news and press releases. You can also post creative infographics and images as replacement to the blogs you commonly share. These materials have better ROI because it is shared easily, and has better click-through rate.

Use Attractive Featured Images

Pictures are what attract readers to read your shared contents that is why you have to be creative in choosing which featured image you use. Remember, when you share your blog to Facebook, a shared link thumbnail will be featured. Make sure these images are attractive and optimized.

Social media is not only for sharing, it is also for newsjacking

If you think of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms as tools meant only to share your contents, then you are not using these tools’ potential. Many experts also use social media sites for newsjacking. It is a technique where marketers share, publish, and talk about trending topics, to ride on its popularity. While it might sound like taking advantage of other’s credits, newsjacking is an effective strategy to use in content creation and social media.

It is not all about you, do content curation

Content curation is the next big thing in social media. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings does this, and Guy Kawasaki of AllTop suggests this, as well. As experts say, your contents should be 20% about you, and 80% about someone else. Content curation is convenient for readers because they can find loads of related articles in one place.

Social buttons for your visitors

Never hide social media buttons on your blogs. These buttons make your blogs, and contents easier to share. Once shared, you have to respond to comments. There might be positive and negative feedback about your contents, so make sure to choose which are the ones worth responding.

Be consistent in sharing your contents, schedule them if you need to

Consistency is the key in social media and content marketing. You won’t improve your sales, and followers overnight so you have to keep on sharing and posting contents. Analyze reader response- likes, shares, comments, mentions- to maximize your site’s potential. If you are busy, you can use social media management applications to schedule your posts.

Integrating social media accounts with your marketing plans can be helpful. But you should also be careful in using it because a single mistake can hurt your business. The tips above can help you avoid making wrong actions online, and also create a better marketing plan beneficial to your company’s growth.

About Author:

Author’s Bio: Lace Wanders is a blogger, and a writer who has been writing professionally since she was in college. She took a degree in business communication, and is now working as a writer for Best Essays.