Post Mortem of Social Media Failure

By Daniel Wood

So you’ve taken the time to create great, original, groundbreaking content. You’ve launched multiple Social Media marketing campaigns and taken the time to patiently submit, discuss and exchange links. But six months down the road, you haven’t really made any impact on sales, you’re getting traffic but nobody leaves comments on your blog, or your website is still unrecognised and doesn’t turn up on search engines.

It’s probably safe to say that you’ve just become the latest of many Social Media failures. Should you just give up all together? Certainly not! Here are some of the mistakes you could have made, and perhaps you could improve on these for your future campaigns.

You Did Not Make a Social Media Plan

Just like any other type of marketing or advertising, you need to conduct research and planning. Every Social Media website/tool and its community is very different and therefore require unique strategies to work with.

While you may find it difficult to monitor successes of each Social Media tool, there’s no harm in setting overarching goals. What do you want to achieve from Social Media? Just a lot of traffic? Increased search engine rank? More comments on your daily posts?

You Ignored Criticisms

You logged in and saw some negative comments. So you deleted them. Big, big mistake. While they may be extremely discouraging (and sometimes unfair or completely untrue), negative comments show you areas where your design/content could be weak and require improvement. Never ignore negative comments or feedback. Instead, address them. Overlook the frustration of reading negative feedback and use it to make your site even better!

Or, if you disagree with a comment or feedback, then you should explain why you disagree, so at least people know that their opinions count.

You Used Misleading Headlines, Tags and Images

Ever clicked on a Facebook ad that promised you something like “Work at home income, no money needed”, and brought you to a website asking you to sign up for a paid membership that needed you to look for other members? It’s very frustrating for someone to click on something, and seeing a website or blog that completely mismatched expectations. Most people will actually take the effort to write a negative comment or warn people about such headlines or ads.

Even if using that image of a hot girl may result in some click throughs, but it gives you a reputation of someone that deceives people, and certainly won’t result in a return visit!

You Did Not Have an Option to Share

Remember to allow people to share or submit your content! With the modern builds of blog and site platforms these days, it’s so easy to add a link to Digg or Facebook to your blog post and if people genuinely like it, they actually share it, so do it!

A great way to make sure you don’t get onto social networks in the first place is to not have an option to spread your content onto different social networks. Make it as easy as you can for your content to be submitted. Most blogging platforms have plug-ins and extensions that will allow your readers to submit content to most major sites.

You Only Targeted One Social Network

Successful web sites and blogs target multiple Social Media networks, for the same reason as above: different sites have different and unique communities. So, if you’ve done a superb step-by-step on making Nasi Lemak, why not blog about it and at the same time put a videocast of it, uploading to online video networks?

You Only Promoted Yourself

Social Media thrives on sharing. So don’t hog all that traffic to yourself. Not only does it make you look selfish and self-promoting, most sites and blogs have automated mechanisms that actually block these kinds of users.

Instead, if you find other good websites or blogs similar to yours, go ahead and promote them. It’s very likely that your peers will notice and return the favour. Imagine what their traffic could do for you!

You Had Too Many Ads

One thing is for certain: internet users do NOT like annoying ads and in-text advertising. Keep them to the minimum if you must (and by all means, all bloggers and web owners will understand your need for revenue – they’re doing it too!) but be as unintrusive and tasteful as you can about it. Don’t disguise ad links, they’re a waste of time and are probably against your advertiser’s terms of reference anyway!

Your Site Takes Too Long to Load

How long are you willing to wait for a website to load? One minute? Thirty seconds? Most people only wait for five to 10 seconds before closing the window so test out your web site or blog regularly to ensure that it doesn’t take too long to load, or that it at least loads content in stages.

Reduce the sizes of images before posting, and think twice about ads and plugins that eat up precious loading seconds! If you must have them, at least provide an alternative “low-speed” website with fewer graphics and plugins.