You just spent weeks — maybe even months — crafting a social media campaign that’s guaranteed to amaze your customers, awe your competitors and endear your most loyal fans to you for life.

And then you blew it.

How?

Because you didn’t pay attention to the details.

The following three tips are so obvious, they should almost go without saying.  Yet we see these same mistakes being made time and time again — sometimes, even by us.  (Yes, we’re human too — which is why, like you, we sometimes need to remind ourselves of the basics.)

1. Proofread. Nothing hurts the impact of a message like a spelling, grammar or punctuation error.  Whether it’s due to haste, laziness or simply lack of knowledge, these mistakes happen.  The trick is to catch them before your audience does.  Some of the blog posts we help craft for our client Bigelow Tea are reviewed by half a dozen people before they’re published, and the last person in line still catches the occasional gaffe.

2. Watch the clock. If you’re using an ancillary tool like HootSuite or CoTweet to schedule your messages in advance, you need to be aware of two extremely common hiccups:

  • Scheduling a tweet or status update to post at the time you’re writing it, rather than at the time you intend for it to publish.
  • Scheduling an update for AM instead of PM (or vice versa).

Because nothing hurts the ROI of your message like publishing it at 4 AM…

3. Recycle. You have a killer piece of content… but you only post it to one of your channels?  Why waste it?  For example, our client Ouidad may have great photos from New York Fashion Week, but if they were only posted to Facebook, they’d never be searchable on Flickr.  Likewise, just because you’ve tweeted, blogged or otherwise discussed a topic once, that doesn’t mean everyone in your audience saw that individual message.  Repeat the important stuff often, so your busy fans and customers can have multiple opportunities to connect with your big news.

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