Halloween is just three days away! The air is crisp, the leaves are falling; it’s the perfect setting for scary movies and haunted hayrides. But there’s also plenty of scary stuff going on in social media—in particular, for companies using social media to market themselves online (and doing a bad job at it).
Over the summer, we hosted a webinar on The Deadly Sins of Social Media that seemed to really strike a chord with brands who were new to social media marketing and struggling to make the most of it. By pointing out real examples of poor social media marketing to attendees, we were able to help them recognize common social media “fails” within Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and, in general, learn what not to do in their own campaigns. There’s certainly no shortage of scary social media marketing examples out there.
Today we’re highlighting the Top 10 Scariest Social Media Marketing Sins that we’ve helped our clients recognize and overcome:
1. Failing to define goals, objectives and metrics BEFORE diving in. We cannot stress enough how important this is. Clients often come to us excited to start doing social media right away, but with only vague ideas about how to execute it. This is where we take a step back and first help them define a clear strategy that includes goals, objectives, and performance metrics so that they understand how to use social media most effectively. In short, if you don’t know what you want from social media, you’re not going to get much out of it.
2. Not having adequate time or resources to maintain it. To do social media effectively, there’s a significant amount of care and feeding required for upkeep. Someone has to write the blog posts, tweet, update Facebook, make connections on LinkedIn, and so on—and do it all on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this is something that many businesses fail to realize before launching social media, and often the reason why their accounts languish.
3. No planned content strategy in place. As we just pointed out, social media marketing is often high maintenance. Apart from insufficient resources, another major reason why businesses struggle with SMM is the pressure to generate content. Despite how easy it is to use social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, it takes a coordinated effort to read, research, curate, and share content that is valuable to your friends and followers; even more so with blog and video content.
4. Not doing it often or consistently enough. Something that should go hand-in-hand with a good content strategy is frequency, or how often you’ll engage in social media. Once a company starts blogging, tweeting, updating Facebook, etc, they are setting an unspoken expectation that they’ll be doing it regularly. Exactly how regularly is what needs to be considered and communicated.
5. There isn’t a real person behind the wheel. There is perhaps nothing more annoying or disingenuous than a company who runs its social media on autopilot: automated tweets, automated blog posts, automated Facebook updates… Of course, some amount of automation is often necessary to manage multiple accounts and make them gel, but the worst offenders are the companies who leave out the “social” in social media.
6. “Absentee” social media. We’ve seen countless companies with empty profiles, abandoned Twitters, blank Facebooks, and almost-blogs that give the impression that A) they don’t care, or b) someone is asleep at the wheel. We’d venture to say it’s almost better to have NO social media presence than it is to have a half-baked one. (But we’ll make an exception for name-camping.)
7. Ignoring your fans, followers, friends (and critics). A huge part of engaging in social media is listening—truly listening—to what people are saying about your brand on blogs, social networks, and elsewhere. Whether you’re initiating the conversation or not, someone, somewhere is probably discussing your brand and you should know about it. There are a number of powerful tools, both free or low-cost tools as well as more robust & expensive ones that will will make the process easy.
8. Bombarding people with sales pitches. If your blog or Twitter is rife with spam and self-promotion, most people aren’t going to be interested to hear what you have to say. While it’s certainly acceptable to promote your business in some way (after all, that’s why you’re doing social media marketing to begin with), remember to keep the sales pitches to a minimum and provide something of true value.
9. Mismanaging your social media assets. Here’s a classic (and real) example of what we mean: an intern or temp sets up your company’s social media profile, then leaves the company taking your account details and login access with them. Several clients have come to us with similar horror stories; that they no longer have control over their Facebook or Twitter pages because an underling set them up. Your company’s social media assets should be given the same treatment as your website, and managed by someone reliable.
10. Putting too many eggs into the social media basket. Social media can be a very effective and rewarding marketing tool when used effectively. However, social media is NOT the silver bullet and despite what people often say about it, social media is NOT free either. Companies who invest too much time in social media at the detriment of other forms of marketing are tipping the scales too much. It’s important to strike the right balance with social media and find an appropriate place for it in your marketing mix.
Have you seen any companies commit social media marketing “sins” like these? We’d love to read your stories—please share them in the comments!
Want to learn even more about social media marketing? The Marketing With Social Media: An Hour a Day collection is now for sale on Amazon and includes:
- Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
- Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day
- Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
- YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day
Related posts:
- 5 Tips for Social Media Marketing Success
- 7 Legal Issues to be Aware of for Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Plays a Role in History
- Social Media Catches March Madness
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I think one of the key points is the “consistency” factor. I’ve found that I have to really be tweeting/engaged in social media for most of the day to be effective. The only way I can do that is to schedule tweets/Facebook posts. Very important to check in and monitor responses. Great post! I tweeted it!
We totally agree re: being really engaged; it’s definitely hard to do when there isn’t a dedicated person pulling the strings; many small companies struggle with it. Glad you enjoyed our post, thanks for retweeting!
[...] Top 10 Scariest Social Media Marketing Sins. [...]
Pingback by Top 10 Scariest Social Media Marketing Sins | Robert Spiller Marketing Consultants @Detroit, Mi — October 29, 2010 @ 7:18 pm
Great info. Is this possible when one person is running a small business?
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Pingback by A Spooky Halloween Story: 10 Scariest Social Media Marketing Sins | social media services — November 1, 2010 @ 12:00 am
Lots of companies think its just to register an account at Facebook, Twitter or some other service and let the users of the service do the rest.
The things you look into here is a really good starting point for newcomers to social media
Comment by Olav Frengstad — November 1, 2010 @ 6:14 am
I think we have all witness these and probably if we are honest committed the odd one yourself.
Really helpful post for when speaking to corporate businesses, help them see the pitfalls as well as the potential.