Every year social media platforms come up with different features and changing algorithms. This creates numerous challenges for social media marketers. Even the introduction of new social media platforms such as Clubhouse and Twitch have changed how brand marketers frame social media marketing campaigns. Social media marketing is a vital part of every business that has a presence on social media. The marketing strategies help brands connect with audiences and potential customers.
Even with numerous social media platforms available, brands have to struggle to reach their goals on social media. The pandemic posed a unique challenge for the brands and even the post-pandemic phase is not free of hassles. The introduction of new platforms changed audience behaviour, and complicated algorithms have only made it tough for brands to make a mark on social media.
Social media marketing tools like Unbox Social are now more important than ever. In order to solve the social media marketing challenges, it is necessary to monitor data and track competitors on a daily basis. This is where this tool comes in handy. (Already interested in knowing more about the tool? We’ll tell you all about it in this blog)
In this blog, we will help you understand the challenges of social media marketing in 2022. Well, not just that, we will also help you solve these problems with effective solutions. Let’s begin.
Challenges of Social Media Marketing and Their Solutions
1. Choosing the right social media platform for marketing
Cross-channel marketing is the need of the hour for most brands and businesses. Brands need to create an identity on multiple digital channels to connect to every audience set. This has resulted in a lot of confusion because social media managers need to choose the right platforms for marketing their products and services. With so many platforms to choose from, managers often fail to select the relevant ones and end up ruining their overall marketing campaign.
It is commonly observed that managers simply check the popularity of a platform and the user population on it for selection. This might not be enough! In order to choose the right social media platform for marketing, social media metrics and data need to be analysed. Brand managers need to track their brand performance on all platforms to decide which one works the best for their promotional and marketing activities.
The numerous platforms have further put managers in a dilemma. Marketing on platforms that do not yield desired results often leads to a waste of resources. This is why choosing the right platform is a must.
Solution- The best way to overcome this problem is to rely on social media analytics tools like Unbox Social. The Unbox Social tool helps you analyse and track data of your brand performance on social media. The tool caters to four major social media platforms namely Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. The social media analytics solution of the tool is available for all four platforms. With the help of the data provided by the tool, brand managers can decide which platforms work the best for their marketing campaigns. This will help you shortlist the most relevant platforms for your brand.
2. Inability to understand the audience base
The change in the content formats and the emergence of new social media platforms have led to a drastic change in the way the audience consumes content. Additionally, the user preferences have also changed wherein they are more aware of what they want to follow and associate with on social media. The specific audience preferences have further made it difficult for brand managers to choose a target audience. Initially, only basic audience demographics were taken into consideration and that was enough to understand the audience. But that’s not enough anymore. Along with audience data, it is also necessary to know about the audience sentiment towards your brand. This is where most brands fail.
Solution- The Unbox Social tool offers audience sentiment data too. The tool offers audience sentiment data that helps you analyse how the audience feels about your brand. The tool also helps you track the sentiments by the use of emojis. The sentiment analysis feature helps you know whether your brand is being perceived positively or negatively. This will help you frame effective strategies that get your brand on the positive side of the scale.
3. Measuring ROI (There’s more than sales in a social media marketing campaign)
For most brand managers, the sales figure constitutes the only measurable unit when it comes to measuring the success of a campaign. However, these were the good old times when only sales mattered. Times have changed and there is more to measuring the ROI of a campaign than that. Most brand goals and objectives are measurable like follower growth, interaction rate, and so on but some factors cannot be measured directly through data like brand recognition, brand awareness, and so on.
Managers often fail to measure these parameters which indirectly impacts their results. Additionally, measuring the competitors is also a complicated task for marketers.
Solution- The Unbox Social tool helps you measure your industry competitors thoroughly. The tool is designed to give you data on our competitors where you can see what kind of content is fetching them positive metrics on social media platforms. The tool also has an advanced comparison feature that allows you to compare keywords and hashtags used by your competitors and their results. This helps you improve your social media marketing strategies. Additionally, the competitors’ data also brings to the surface the flaws in your brand strategy.
4. Getting followers on social media platforms
Initially, getting followers on social media platforms had a few simple rules and those consisted of- posting relevant content and being consistent on the platform. However, a lot has changed for brands on social media. Getting followers now is a big challenge for brand marketers and the reason is an overload of content on social media and the rise in the number of competing bands on each platform. This has raised several red flags for brands that are just starting out. The audience is aware of what they want to follow and what social media pages are useful to them. The main problem here is to gain active followers that interact with your brand on social media.
Solution- Tracking the post performance of your brand on social media will help you detect a pattern of your follower growth on social media. The Unbox Social tool gives you data on how each of your posts have performed along with the follower growth rate and subscribers lost and gained depending on the social media platform in question. This data helps you solve the problem of follower growth because it gives you a hint of what is working well for your brand and audience and what kind of content you need to produce to gain more followers.
5. Lack of clarity on what kind of influencer content generates engagement 
As we mentioned before, content overload is a serious problem for marketers because the audience has innumerable content to choose from. This makes it difficult for brands to make a mark on the platforms. Audiences fail to recognise good quality content over trends and this further creates a hurdle for brands on many levels. Brands also collaborate with influencers to maximize their reach and engagement on social media but that’s not a guaranteed approach. Often brands fail to connect with their target audience even with the help of influencers! The social media platforms offer several content creating features but understanding what works for each brand is a tough question to answer. Video content has been the most effective form of content marketing lately but brands still need to put efforts into discovering trends on social media to create relevant video content. This has been a cause of concern for most brands!
Solution- The Unbox Social tool has an influencer tracking solution that allows you to monitor and track the performance of social media influencers. This helps you choose the right influencers that can increase the chances of success of your influencer marketing campaigns. Choosing influencers based on data helps you get the best influencers for your brand. Additionally, it helps you select influencers that are in sync with your brand goals, objectives, and target audience.
6. Maintaining consistency on social media platforms to create a brand identity
Brands have to be consistent on social media to keep in touch with their target audience. This means marketers need to have a content plan ready to make sure their audience does not forget about their presence. Right from Instagram stories to videos, brands need to keep their social media profiles active by posting relevant content. This is easier said than done! In many cases, lack of planning is the reason why brands are not consistent on social media. Inconsistency also impacts social media metrics in several ways.
Solution- Post scheduling tools can help brand managers schedule their content systematically. The Unbox Social tool is all set to roll out the scheduling feature which will help you draft content for your social media posts. The feature will ease your content planning woes to a great extent.
We hope these solutions will help you craft effective social media marketing strategies for your brand. Make sure you use the Unbox Social features effectively and get the most out of the tool. Here are a few more blogs to help you with social media marketing-
