When Social Media Campaigns Fail

A Guide to Ensuring and Maintaining Social Networking Success

Many businesses set up company pages in various social media sites and think it’s smooth sailing from thereon. Content is updated sporadically and comments are left unanswered until much later. Online campaigns have failed and you don’t know what went wrong when other companies have made it big.

Here’s a checklist to help you examine your progress or lack of it:

Make a commitment.

A social media campaign is not something you can start and then leave to take care of itself. It needs to be updated with new blog posts at least once a week. Regular monitoring is also important to ensure that comments are answered on time. This will make customers feel well-attended. Check the analytics to find out what articles get the most traffic. This will help you improve upon your strategy and make success easier to reach.

Find the best social networking site that fits your business.

Look for mentions of your business name in the web to find out where your customers flock. Create an account and establish your presence first. For example, your customers reviewed your business in Yelp. Make an account in Yelp to track the feedback and engage with customers. This will enable you to find out what they’re saying and help you perform immediate damage control for complaints, when needed.

Engage regularly.

When there are customers who regularly engage with the content you post, your social media campaign is a success. Ask questions to initiate conversations and be prepared to answer back as soon as customers reply to your queries. Not answering back promptly may confuse and annoy them enough. Be sure to activate your notifications or better yet, make a regular sweep. This will ensure you’re not missing any comment you’ve forgotten to answer a while back.

Create catchy content.

Without creative content, your target audience will lose interest. Talk about industry news and avoid over-promotion of your business. Minimize sponsoring your business in your articles. Doing so will turn off your customers. Post original content instead. You don’t need to create long articles every time you post. What matters is that you regularly update at least every week to make people keeping on coming back to visit your social media pages.

Run contests.

Contests are a good way to bring more attention to your business. They generate exposure and excitement enough to attract more traffic to your page. Run contests around three months or so and give away prizes that will thrill your followers. This will expose them to your brand and make them avail your merchandise more often.

Try other social networking sites.

Staying on one social media site can prevent you from broadening the extent of your online social presence. Try out personal profiles in other social networks. Once you’ve gained mastery of the features, make a company or brand page to expose your business to the people active in that community. This will also help you find out whether a social network is a right fit for your business. If that particular social site is not helping you with the campaign, you can deactivate or delete the brand page. You can also redirect them to your existing and active pages.

Delegate social media tasks.

It can be overwhelming to keep your campaigns up to date and run your business at the same time. When tasks become too much to handle, delegate them to capable people. This would make your projects more manageable to deal with.

Having a social media plan can make campaigns easier to see through. Follow a structured road map or customize it according to your own social networking needs to earn success.

 

Reference: Social Media Examiner