Every day, social media consultants pull off very successful social marketing campaigns for clients as well as for their own sites. But often when those less experienced with this fairly new type of marketing try and pull off similar feats, they end up failing miserably. So what makes some social marketing successful while others are doomed to never leave the starting gate? Here are some of the top reasons why social media campaigns fail, and what you can do to ensure you are not mistakenly making the same ones.

Time
If you want your social marketing efforts to pay off, you need to put in the time. And this is one of the most important areas that people tend to neglect. But surprisingly, even though some of those efforts might take all of 30 seconds a day, people just don’t do it. A friend was bragging to me that he has 300 Twitter followers. But when I checked out his Twitter profile, he had tweeted four times in six months. Even if he had to request his password every time he posted to Twitter, his total time spent putting into Twitter was a mere five minutes. Further questioning revealed he thought it sucked because it didn’t send him any traffic. Well, no surprise there! Imagine what he could have done with five minutes a day… or even a week, but he simply didn’t put the time in. No social media campaign will work if you don’t have time set aside to be social with it.

Effort
And what is time without effort. Sure, you could happen to get on the front page of Digg with your very first submission. But chances are you will need many, many more than that before once of your submissions hits the front page. Whether it is building your profile with submissions, voting, commenting, stumbling, etc, it can be a tremendous amount of work, especially if you are focusing on more than one social media site at once.

Hunting
We all can’t be the one who creates that killer blog post that is begging to be on the front page of Digg or Sphinn… which means you actually have to search out interesting - and timely - things to submit in order to build up your profile. And that means having a ton of blogs on your RSS that tend to post entries that Digg/Sphinn/Reddit/Mixx etc love… AND then you also have to be the first one who submits it. In the time it takes to fill your coffee cup, someone can scoop that next submission that will hit the front page.

Consistency
On StumbleUpon, to be a top Stumbler, you have to put the time in… and this means stumbling A LOT. And we are not talking minutes, try an hour a day… but consistently. And if you aren’t consistent, you will fall off the top stumblers list, and your Stumble value has just dropped considerably. If you don’t tweet regularly on Twitter, you will miss out on the natural interaction between followers that result in other people discovering you and becoming a follower. The same can even be said for writing killer headlines, especially if writing is not your forte… if you take a month hiatus from submitting to your social media site of choice, you will be rusty when you come back to it. Consistency is key - and yes, this can mean every single day, or at the very least the weekdays. But it will pay off with success.

Visibility
Along with consistency comes visibility, which can be a make-or-break scenario when you are active on many social sites. When other people see you on other sites they are also active on, they become much more aware of who you are and what you are doing. If someone is your fan on StumbleUpon, they will probably give your submissions a closer look if they see you on Digg… and those extra votes that came strictly because of your visibility on other sites could be the votes that promote your submission to the front page. If you aren’t visible - and this even means ensuring you share the same username across the sites as well as using the same avatar, because they won’t know RyGuy, LVUGrad and HotTaco across various sites are actually all the same person - you lose the visibility value of cross networking.

Brute Force
You have that initial excitement when you notice that one of your pages has been submitted to Digg and it has a good chance of hitting the front page with the number of votes it already has. So what do you do? Send a notice around asking all 32 people in the office to Digg it too. Well, unfortunately for people who do this (and this happens a lot more frequently than you’d think!) not only will that entry have no shot of making the front page, but you will probably end up getting most, if not all of those accounts banned too along with your IP for good measure. If you have an office with multiple employees, just make a rule that they are not permitted to be logged into their social media accounts where this could be an issue (Digg is notorious for this) and voting or submitting to any of them from the office. Instead, request that anything they want to do be done from home instead. And yes, make sure they know this covers their breaks at work too!

Tunnel Vision
Sure, we all would love our own stuff to be on the front page of Digg or to get Stumbled… but we don’t live in a bubble so it doesn’t take long to cross the line where it seems that the only sites you are aware of that exist are all your own. So you need to be sure you mix it up with sites you have no relation to, whether it is larger news sites, techy sites such as Wired or even a small blog that posted a very submission-worthy entry. So while you might Stumble one of your sites, don’t submit or stumble another one from that site. Trust me, your fans will be able to tell exactly which sites are yours when they notice the same ones pop up again and again and they will be turned off by it. So make sure you are submitting, voting, stumbling all kinds of other sites… a good ratio would be to have only 1 self promoting one for every 30-50 non-promoting ones. Of course, this can definitely vary depending on the specific site you are doing as some have more leniency than others… for example, with Twitter you can self-promote all you want and Twitter is fine with that but your followers might not be though! A good rule of thumb is to see what the top users of the site are doing and follow their lead.

Not De-Spamming
Sure, you have a fabulous new product you feel everyone would love to have… but post about how great this new must-have product is on Digg and it will die a quiet death with about 3 Diggs, unless it happens to be about a new video game. Spin it around about how a product does something unexpected (think what mentos do when put in diet Pepsi), how a celebrity ironically endorses it (okay, I am sure Nicole Kidman is a smart woman, but she wouldn’t be the first person I would chose to endorse More Brain Training for the DS), or even the funny/interesting/must-watch commercial that goes along with the product, such as the Dove commercial that went crazily viral a year and a half ago or any of the “Get a Mac” commercials.

While there are other reasons why social media campaigns can fail, these are the ones I see popping up again and again when discussing with clients how to best promote themselves in the social space. If you are making these mistakes, set aside time to think about how to best handle your campaigns, and then make sure you are implementing them properly so that the next time you decide to tackle your social site of choice, you have increased your odds of being successful and reaping the benefits that come from it.

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Written on April 15, 2008 at 11:49 pm and filed under Social Media Marketing. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.