Back to blog
After creating more than 500 social media marketing plans over the last 15 years, I can confidently say: the biggest lessons don’t come from the wins. They come from the facepalms. I’ve seen companies fail spectacularly, I’ve seen marketing goals miss the mark, and I’ve seen perfectly color-coded calendars that never got a single post live. So, what went wrong? What is a common issue with social media marketing plans? I’ll cover it in my article today.
The biggest mistake: thinking the plan is the finish line
One of the most common issues with social media is treating the plan as a static, one-and-done deliverable. Teams spend weeks planning, choosing platforms, and approving visual content, then breathe a sigh of relief once everything is scheduled… and forget to look back.
But social media isn’t a “set and forget” channel. Your audience reacts in real time, algorithms change overnight, and engagement levels tell you what’s working long before your quarterly report does. A great social media strategy requires you to engage, tweak, fine-tune again, and sometimes even scrap posts that aren’t reaching the right audience. Without that ongoing feedback loop, you’re just broadcasting into the void.
I’ve seen it firsthand when I advised an agency that had just started building their social media team. They were so proud of their first proper plan: a 30-day calendar full of polished posts, timed to perfection across all social media platforms.
But once the posts went live, no one touched them again. Comments went unanswered, engagement flatlined, and no one bothered to check which posts were actually performing. They celebrated when the calendar was finished instead of when their audience reacted.
The plan looked flawless on paper, but it left them with no growth.
Chasing vanity metrics instead of business outcomes
Many agencies still do this, and it drives me crazy. They obsess over vanity metrics: likes, impressions, and reach… as if they were proof of success. Those numbers might look good in a report, but they often hide missed opportunities and posts reaching the wrong audience.
Here’s how I look at it:
❌ Vanity metrics to stop obsessing over: likes, raw impressions, follower counts, views with no action taken.
✅ Metrics that matter: click-throughs, saves, shares from your target audience, conversion rates, comments that show real interest, and measurable goals like sign-ups or leads generated.
Optimizing for popularity instead of performance hurts brand visibility and can lead to incorrectly identifying what actually works. Social media should feed into clear objectives, not just make your dashboard look pretty.
Planning too late
Social media doesn’t wait for you. If your social media marketing efforts start after the campaign launch, you’re already behind. Late planning means your posts never reach the target audience at the right time, and your social media accounts end up reacting instead of leading.
Planning too late usually shows up as:
- Campaign posts going live after launch. Your social media marketing campaigns should build anticipation, not look like an afterthought.
- No time to optimize for different platforms. The same post gets copy-pasted everywhere, tanking engagement rate and organic reach.
- Zero room to adjust. Even if social media analytics tools show your content underperforming, you’re too busy catching up to tweak it.
Your marketing efforts become last-minute filler that does little for your brand’s image or potential customers. Sounds oddly familiar?
Build your social media marketing strategy alongside your marketing campaigns. Map out a clear plan, create quality content early, and schedule posts to stay ahead of social media algorithms. When you give yourself space to measure success and refine based on data, you create engaging content that attracts a wider audience and drives steady growth.
Planning too little
If there’s one thing worse than overplanning, it’s underplanning. I’ve seen businesses try to “wing it” on social media, hoping inspiration strikes on Monday morning when someone remembers they haven’t posted in a week.
Planning too little means your posts end up rushed or completely detached from your marketing goals. Sorry to break it to you, but you’re just filling space. And that leads to serving a feed that looks more like a forgotten noticeboard than a place where your brand’s voice comes through.
Even a basic content strategy is better than none. Sketch out your themes, decide what type of visual content you’ll use, and align it with campaigns you already have running. Build checks into the process in the same fashion that marketing teams regularly run email verification to keep their lists accurate. That way, your social media efforts are truly part of the bigger picture.
No clear ownership of engagement and the plan
In one company I worked with, they had a great social media calendar and a solid strategy, but no clear understanding of who owned what once posts went live. Marketing thought customer service would handle the replies, and customer service assumed marketing was monitoring the accounts.
The result was predictable. Customer concerns went unanswered, negative feedback piled up, and small issues turned into brand reputation problems. It was that no one had clear objectives for who handled engagement.
Before a single post goes out, decide who owns community management, reporting, and responding to comments. When there’s accountability, you can address customer concerns quickly and keep posts reaching people at the right time.
Copy-pasting content across all platforms
Nothing screams “lazy marketing” like dumping the exact same post on five channels and hoping it works everywhere. Each platform has its own preferred formats, image sizes, and posting rhythms: ignoring those differences is one of the fastest ways to tank engagement and lose brand visibility.
What’s sized perfectly for Instagram may look broken on LinkedIn. A clever tweet might flop on Facebook because the tone doesn’t fit the audience-based culture there. When brands do this, engagement drops and the content starts to feel inconsistent and out of touch with the latest trends.
Creating content that performs is nothing more than just adapting the core idea so it feels native to each platform. Some teams even experiment with AI coding techniques to auto-adjust visuals, captions, or layouts while keeping brand voice consistent. That’s how you maintain a clear brand identity and get posts reaching the right audience without wasted resources.
Not leaving room for real-time marketing
When I stepped in as an interim head of content at one agency, their calendar was a work of art: every post approved, every caption polished, every slot filled for the next six weeks.
It looked perfect… until reality happened.
Halfway through the month, a competitor dropped a bold campaign that hijacked everyone’s feed. Our posts kept rolling out like nothing had happened. They felt stale, even a little disconnected from the audience’s interests. Negative comments started popping up under posts that were scheduled weeks earlier, and no one had time to adjust or respond.
Locking yourself into a rigid plan means:
- Wasted resources on posts that never reach the desired results.
- Inappropriate content slipping through during moments when silence would protect brand reputation.
- Missed chances to gain insights and increase engagement when it matters most.
A smart plan leaves space to create content on the fly: not as a panic move, but as a strategic choice. Keep a buffer in your schedule and use market research to guide which trends are worth jumping on. This keeps your brand identity consistent while still showing a strong presence that feels relevant and capable of building meaningful engagement with a loyal following.
Relying too much on real-time marketing
I feel I need to balance out the approach I just mentioned: because if one mistake is leaving no room for RTM, the other is making it your entire strategy.
Real-time marketing is exciting, but living on it is like living on energy drinks. If that’s all you do, your social media marketing efforts start to feel reactive instead of strategic.
Let’s say a new meme drops and everyone in your industry jumps on it. You do too: and get a quick spike in engagement. Then another trend pops up, and you chase that one. After a few weeks, your feed is just a collection of trend-chasing posts.
They might go viral, they might not. But they certainly won’t move you closer to your marketing goals or help you identify warm prospects, ready to enter your pipeline through lead routing tools. Your audience stops seeing you as a brand with a clear identity and starts seeing you as just more noise in the timeline.
A better approach is to use RTM as a spark, not the whole fire. Anchor your social media accounts with planned campaigns, then react to what’s relevant for your audience and brand reputation. That balance is what builds meaningful engagement and turns spikes into steady growth.
How to fix it?
Fixing these mistakes is about smarter structure, ownership, and… using the right tools. Here are targeted actions that bring clarity and make sure your social media marketing plans actually deliver.
- Define clear objectives up front (what you want: leads, deals, improved brand visibility, addressing customer concerns) and set measurable goals (conversion, reach among the right audience).
- Tailor content format per platform. Use correct image & video sizes, tone of voice, calls-to-action. Don’t copy-paste across channels; try to adapt for the audience.
- Assign ownership for engagement and oversight. Someone must be responsible for replying to comments and tracking performance.
- Build in flexibility. Schedule buffer slots for reacting to latest trends or urgent issues. Enable fast approval workflows so you can pivot without derailing your overall plan.
It might seem overwhelming at first, but, fortunately, there’s a powerful tool designed to simplify the entire process for you.
It’s called Kontentino.
Use Kontentino to streamline, not complicate
Forget switching beteween ten tabs, mis-formatted graphics, and chaos in approvals. Kontentino is one of those tools that takes a lot of those headaches off your hands.
Here’s what Kontentino actually does well:
- Content planning & visual calendar. You get an intuitive drag-and-drop calendar with multiple views (calendar, board, list) so you can see what your social media marketing campaigns look like at a glance, with gaps, overlaps, overstuffed days… all of it.
- Live preview for formats across platforms. Before anything goes live, you can see exactly how it’ll look on different platforms.
- Approval workflows & role-based tasks. Assign tasks, send posts for internal or client approval, leave notes, track who approved what when. No more confusion over “who was supposed to reply” or “which version is final.”
- Collaboration & content library. All your media, draft ideas, captions, assets stored in one place. Team members can propose changes, and everyone sees the full history. Helps avoid inconsistencies in brand voice or content reuse issues.
- Analytics + performance insights. You don’t just publish and forget. Kontentino provides post performance, page performance, and competitor analysis so you can see which posts are truly reaching the right audience and which are just generating vanity metrics. Use that data to adjust your plan, not bury it in vague “reach” numbers.
Over to you
Now it’s your turn: audit your current plan. Are you chasing vanity metrics or tying posts to measurable goals? Are you really doing everything to avoid – or fix – these mistakes?
If not, it might be time to shake things up. Try tightening your process. Use a tool like Kontentino to centralize planning and keep everyone on the same page.
Your next calendar doesn’t have to be perfect… it just has to be alive.
