Failing at social media is much easier than succeeding at it! Nothing makes us angrier on a daily basis than clients with unreasonable ideas about what can be accomplished via social media and how "easy" that should be. Here are seven ways we've watched people completely fail at social media. Don't make their mistakes!

 

Fail Number 1: Don't Properly Develop Your End Product

This is, surprisingly, the number one on our list of typical errors. The rise of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks created a situation where, suddenly, marketers and business owners had access to millions of potential customers' contact information ... for free. This had never happened before. In the past, you either needed to attract your customers via a paid media campaign, a time-consuming and low return guerilla campaign, or by purchasing a lead list. When used properly, social media leads can be very effective, it's true. However, what ultimately happened was that the rise of easy access to potential leads through social media allowed many new business owners, and some existing ones, to get the idea that they could shortchange their end-product development because they could make up for it by marketing to mass "numbers" via social media.

 

This theory is erroneous. Here is the truth: If your end product is not fully developed or it doesn't meet a market need (or, better yet, both), you can have a million social media followers and it will not matter to your bottom line. Period. Not only that, but launching a social media campaign before your product or website is fully developed to its best possible form means that you will burn through followers or friends. Once a user clicks on a link back to your site and is discouraged by a poor product, bad website design or "web scam" tactics, you will lose them as a valuable potential customer and advocate.

 

This is not to say that you can't use social media to build buzz about your product before it launches. We've watched clients successfully build twitter lists of thousands of users before their website was even live. Tweet interesting, valuable content that your users will care about (on other websites) and put up a holder splash page at your url that, in an appealing way, says that your site will be live soon and collects email addresses for notification when it is. Not only will you begin to build up an advocate base because of the quality of your social media content, but you'll get a jump start on SEO when your followers retweet and link back to the message that your site as gone live ... as long as your site is amazing when it does go live!

 

Fail Number 2: Use Shortcut Updates

Su.pr, Tweetdeck, RSS Graffiti, Twitter as a tool for updating multiple status locations - these all have their place in managing your social media. That place, however, is not for you to slap in a piece of content, immediately distribute it to all of your social media channels, and then be done with it. Here's why: Social media is, at base, social and personal. When your Twitter or Facebook wall begins to look like an RSS feed, then your social media contacts, both potential and existing, understand that your page is low value. They are not on a social media outlet for the purpose of being part of an endless information chain. They are there to be part of a network. It will not take long for them to realize that you don't care about them enough to do more than shoot out automated content updates, and they will cease to care about you.

 

What's our favorite comment about these services? "But it saves me so much time!" Really? The five minutes it would take you to do a manual, personalized, copy and paste job to your networks is that valuable? Then you are more important than we are.

 

Fail Number 3: Don't Interact

See the note above about why people are on social media outlets. If you're doing things correctly, you won't need to force interaction because your content will be engaging enough that people will tweet back to you or discuss it on your social media pages. But if you are not, you still need to show that you're on your social networks to be social. Actively comment, retweet other's tweets and participate in discussions. Once you become an outbound only social media channel, you eliminate the media type's real power.

 

Fail Number 4: Don't Take the Time to Recruit Followers

Even if you have a website of millions of registered users, they will not flock to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or for that matter blog or email follower list on their own. In addition to which, if you're only building your list from your existing customers, you're missing out on the advocate growing and brand building power of social networks. Notice that we did not say that you were missing out on the customer acquisition benefits of social networks, because as we have said repeatedly, those will be few and far between (though existent if you do social media well). Stay within the bounds of the social network you're recruiting on (ie: don't spam or violate Twitter's churn policies - which is not to say that you can't remove wasted follows), but actively recruit and attract new followers. This is time consuming. To do it correctly means that you need to organize your followers into lists (time consuming) and then un-follow selectively (also time consuming). On Facebook, it means that you *must* find good viral content. On LinkedIn, it means that you bring value to the table. However, you should allocate several hours a week to actively recruiting social media contacts. Until your list has reached a critical mass of over ten thousand, sometimes over fifteen thousand, you will not grow sufficiently (and sometimes at all) via only viral propagation.

 

Fail Number 5: Don't Balance the SEO Benefits

Most social networks bring with them a significant SEO benefit. You're remiss if you're not taking advantage of this. Whatever content you're posting on your website should be getting posted to your social media outlets (NOT via an auto-update so that your pages read as follows: Blog Update: Title, Blog Update: Title, Blog Update: Title). In addition to the immediate density you'll build from your own posting, you get SEO value from reposts, retweets, etc. If you're not using your social media in a way that links back to your website and encourages others to promote those links, then you're wasting a huge portion of the benefit.

 

However, there's the flip side. If you're only using your social media as a link building exercise, then you're missing out on all of the social, customer communication, customer retention, community building and viral benefits. Being "on" your social networks is time consuming. The great myth of social network marketing is that it saves you time and resources. It is, in fact, time consuming in both a resource and financial way when done correctly (after all, you need to have content to support your social network postings). But if you don't focus on both the technical (SEO) value as well as the community/customer retention value, you're not getting the benefits of the medium.

 

Fail Number 6: Bad Content Strategies

There was a time when content drove the internet. And then there was a time when it didn't. And then social networks flourished and, once again, it's a content provider's world out there. Perhaps you don't think that you need content to make your social network marketing work? You are wrong. Content is what engages people. It's what makes them read and stay on the site that they linked to. It's what builds a relationship with them. It's what causes them to forward information about you. It's what builds SEO value for you, and it's what makes you unique. If you think you can get away with effective social marketing without content to support it, you are wrong.

 

And it has to be good content. Just because there are people out there who will slap out a three-hundred word article for you for eight dollars, it doesn't mean that you should use that solution, because chances are that the content will not be good enough to matter.

 

And it has to be the content that your readers want! Just because you like to write in a certain tone and voice about certain topic matter, it doesn't mean that that's what your readers and followers want to hear. And just because it's the right content for your corporate blog, it doesn't mean that it's the right content for your social media (a place where more controversial and salacious material will get you further). Pay attention to what content your competitors produce and how well it generates responses, as well as to what works on your own social media. Then manufacture more content just like that!

 

It's also advisable to occasionally repost content from other websites. This shows that you're an active part of the social network community, it encourages others to repost your postings, and it shows your readers that you care about finding information that they'll care about. Just don't do it too often or you'll start missing out on SEO benefits.

 

Fail Number 7: Bad Timing

Companies who outsource their social media overseas or European companies that market in North America, we're talking to you. If a social media post goes up at 6:00am EST (ie: 3:00am PST), no matter how much effort may have gone into it, you just wasted your social media post. Unless you are in a very specific niche industry, anybody who is online at 6:00am EST and 3:00am PST is not somebody you are trying to attract as a social media advocate. Between noon and 4:00pm EST is when you'll get the best results, unless you are doing a real-time social media event.

 

Failing at social media is much easier than succeeding at it. There's a misperception that social media management is a highly efficient, low cost, low resource way to grow your web business. It's not! It's certainly an important part of your marketing mix, but it has to be done well. And that, my friends, is more difficult than it sounds.