7 Myths of Social Media You Still Believe are True - Andava Digital Marketing Agency (2023)

Myths are typical not only of Greek and Roman storytelling but marketing as well and SMM is not an exception. The most common social media myths are:

It’s hard to measure social media marketing success
Social media marketing is all about publishing posts
It’s OK to publish the same post across all your accounts
You should be present on all social networks
It’s impossible to grow on social networks without ads
Big number of followers equals big success
Social media marketing is easy (and everyone can do it)

If you have ever thought that any of these statements is true, keep reading our post! You’ll know why they are just 7 myths of social media marketing that don’t have anything to do with reality.

Table of Contents

1. It’s hard to measure social media marketing success

Your social media marketing performance has never been so measurable. The first step is understanding what you consider “success” and defining the most relevant metrics.

For most businesses, brand awareness is the top priority on social media. So they will be measuring their success by tracking content reach, story views, and profile visits.

To measure your social media success, you won’t need even a third-party tool. It refers to the cases when success for you is

1. driving traffic and quality visitors to your site (simply use a trackable URL)
2. driving engagement (measure by the number of comments, shares, saves, profile visits, etc)
3. getting brand mentions
4. increasing brand awareness (measure by reach)

A social media management tool will allow you to get access to richer and broader social media analytics. You’ll know how many new contacts you generated, how many sessions happened on your site, which posts performed the best, etc.

2. Social media marketing is all about publishing posts

This is another case when especially newbies will find it hard to distinguish social media myths and facts. Being able to create posts, adding a few emojis and hashtags are necessary but not enough to call it SMM.

Here are some more skills that are required:

3. It’s OK to publish the same post across all your accounts

Maybe it would be “OK” if social media networks weren’t so different from each other.

Links aren’t clickable on Instagram posts. Square images won’t look properly on Pinterest. Adding multiple images to Twitter is not a good idea as the platform is mainly for microblogging and sharing short tweets.

We don’t recommend that you have different posting ideas for different social networks. Your style and messaging should be the same no matter where your content goes live.

The best approach is to repurpose the same idea/blog post into various formats depending on where you are present on.

For example, you wrote a blog post.

Share the link directly to Facebook.

Write the main points directly on your LinkedIn post and put the link in the comments.

Turn the main points into multiple infographics and make a carousel post for Instagram.

Create a quick video and upload it to your Youtube account. Later, you can share that Youtube video on your other accounts as well.

Create a vertical image with the main ideas and upload it to your Pinterest board.

Publishing the same stuff everywhere will make your audience feel bored. Besides, you should pay attention to recommended image sizes and caption character limits for each social network.

In the end, don’t disregard the fact that social networks are also different in their audience demographics.

Users on Instagram love to see aesthetically pleasing images and are mainly 18-29 year-olds. Users on LinkedIn are mainly 30-49 years old and look for ways to connect and build relations. 63% of TikTok users are 10-29 years old and love watching short, dynamic, and creative videos.

You already can see how different the demographics are and how big is the difference in popular content types on each platform.

These facts and numbers are important especially for businesses that have multiple buyer personas and would like to target each group on a separate social network.

For example, if you offer a photo editing app, you will probably target young individuals, SMBs, and maybe enterprises.

Your messaging directed at individuals should be available on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

For targeting businesses, you will probably consider Facebook, while for targeting enterprises, you will probably try LinkedIn.

4. You should be present on all major social networks

Buffer writes about the top 21 social media sites that you can consider for your brand. Though when people say “major”, they mean Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Being present on all of them is definitely not the perfect decision.

For new and small businesses, being present even on 1 social network might be enough. Thus, you can focus all your energy on one platform, create the best posts possible, and build your audience.

Choose the top network where your potential buyers are active and go engage with them actively. Once you start growing, you might expand to 1-2 more networks and increase your reach.

For more mature businesses that have more resources, being present on 2-4 networks will be enough. Eventually, you’ll understand which networks bring the highest traffic, leads, engagement, and stop wasting resources on platforms that don’t work.

5. It’s impossible to grow on social networks without ads

It’s not impossible. However, you should understand how competitive your niche is and what you mean by “growth”. Expecting growth in your audience, engagement, traffic, even leads is definitely possible. How to ensure that?

You should always keep in mind that social media marketing is a two-way process. Publishing a post and waiting for followers, comments leads coming in is not real.

First of all, connect with your existing customers, tag them on posts (with permission), encourage them to create user-generated content. This is a top organic growth strategy for many businesses on social networks.

Another thing you can do is finding accounts similar to yours and engaging with their top posts. Commenting on them is one of the best tactics you can apply.

We aren’t urging you to do mass commenting and leave meaningless emojis in the comments. We urge you to share your unique standpoint and pick curiosity, thus ensuring visits to your profile and higher reach.

6. A big number of followers equals big success

This is one of the most dangerous social media myths that newbies (and not only) continue to believe in.

How many accounts have you seen with hundreds of thousands of followers and little to no engagement? That’s usually the sad result of buying followers and asking other accounts to follow you back, though they aren’t even interested in your offers.

These two options used to be popular but now they are simply the quickest ways to limit your organic reach.

Your focus should always be on publishing interesting posts and stories and having even a 500-member but engaged and loyal community.

7. Social media marketing is easy

“I can do social media myself. I know my business better and there are tons of free resources on the internet.” This idea leads to our final social media myth – SMM is easy and everyone can do it.

Well, it’s true that you can find free, valuable, and easily-digestible resources on SMM. But have you managed other social media accounts before to master the ins and outs? Do you have time to handle all the creative and idea-generating tasks? Won’t you get confused in the sea of information and keep with trends at the same time?

Social media marketing is of paramount importance for any business. And you should let a professional team grow your social presence.

Contact the Andava team and we will conduct a free audit of your social media accounts. Afterward, we will discuss what posts your audience will love and how to build a loyal community for your brand.