Work Through It

It is one thing to fail at something, and quite another to wallow in that failure, moaning about your plight and tearing your hair out by the roots. We all fail. Anyone who says they have never failed has either never tried something new or is lying. The fact is that failure is just a part of life, especially when you are learning a new skill. It is not a failure to fail at something, but it is a failure to not learn from your failures and improve upon them.

Because social media marketing is still in its infancy, there are more failures to learn from than success stories. These failures are a great way to avoid making similar mistakes, and in the process of avoiding these mistakes you might just learn something new that takes your marketing plan to a new level.

You should not only learn from your own failures but from the failures of those around you. Start by examining what your closest industry competitors are doing with social media marketing and try to determine what impact it is having for them. Are they engaging with their social media users? Are they updating their social media network regularly? Are they driving customers, clients or buyers to a specific call-to-action? Do they even have a call-to-action?

There might also be value in looking at the social media campaigns of people outside your industry. You never know if something that is having an impact in a different industry might provide a similar result in your own. Automobiles were once the only things put through an assembly line. Today, anything that has to be assembled is done so in a factory, in a line–in an assembly line fashion. Why? Because if it works for automobiles why couldn’t it work for microwave ovens, doll houses or bicycles?

Have you tried to build your community on this social platform with intention? How? (With research tools and monitoring dashboards or just with guesswork?)

Are you actively seeking out your target audience right now on this platform or are you simply trolling for conversations and hoping those people will just find you?

Are you overlooking an existing audience while you’re searching for a different one? (Sometimes a company may find that a particular platform is brilliant for connecting with say, media contacts, but are so focused on being there to sell to customers that they overlook the new audience they’ve stumbled onto.)

Click here to read more about possible social media failures and remedies.

Tags: branding, lori r taylor, networking, oneclicksociety, product branding, revmediamarketing, social media, social media marketing