Social Media Training: Why Your Campaigns Have Failed

You know you need to be on social to market your business, but for some reason it’s not sticking. No worries. This social media training guide is here to help.

Does your company actively engage on social media outlets as part of your marketing strategy? I’m sure you’ve answered “yes” because social media is such a killer way to build a loyal following.

However, have you noticed that despite all of the hard work you’ve put in, you’re not seeing results and ROI?

That’s why we’re here. With 1/3 of the world using social media regularly, getting to the bottom of why your campaigns are failing is extremely important.

With the proper social media training, you can conquer your audience and appeal to your customers, resulting in the increased ROI you’ve been searching for.

If you can attest to any of these factors below, maybe it’s time to take a step back and re-evaluate what could be causing your campaigns to fail.

Let’s get started!

Your Social Media Training Guide: What are you doing wrong?

Not having long-term or short-term goals

Think about it. Has your company sat down and laid out a plan for your social media outlets? If not, this will need to be done ASAP.

Having a strategy and knowing what your long-term and short-term goals will give your campaigns a purpose.

Without goals set in place, you have nothing to shoot for. There will be little success without identifying why you are there in the first place.

Think about these things when identifying your goals:

1. Which platforms are you using and for what reasons?
2. Are your campaigns consistent across all platforms?
3. How do you plan on increasing your engagement?
4. How many likes/comments do you wish to get on every post?

Make sure there is a clear objective behind everything you spend time doing.

Not engaging enough with your audience

If you’re guilty of being lazy or slow to answering your audience’s comments and/or questions, this is a sure way of social media failure.

It’s important to stay on top of all types of engagement with your audience. Whether it is answering a direct message or just sharing a cool fact with them (that relates to your business, of course).

Yes, it’s very time-consuming, but social media engagement is what’s going to make you stand out amongst the crowd and get your audience coming back for more.

Especially when you have campaigns running, it’s crucial to make sure there is always someone keeping up with the conversation.

Making your posts too sales-like

Social Media Today has a great way to put it — follow the 80/20 rule.

This is making 20% of your content about your brand through call-to-actions or promotional posts, while 80% of your content is about interesting and creative pieces useful to your audience.

If you’re going through your previous social media posts and noticing lots of advertising, take note of this and incorporate much more non-promotional content.

This could be sharing hot or popular topics in your industry from reputable sources, sharing your own creative content, or even re-tweeting something useful to your audience.

Too few individual post likes and comments

While we tend to get super excited when we see our follower base growing, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Think of your following as just a number and your individual post engagement as a much more important factor.

People commenting or liking your actual posts means they are interested and care about what you have to say.

Keep an eye out on the posts that get the most retweets, shares, likes and comments and replicate these.

You can have an insane amount of followers, but if no one’s looking at your content, your follower base really doesn’t matter.

Not paying attention to the competition

If you’re seeing your social media campaigns consistently failing, it’s about time to look at a successful competitor in your industry and see what they are doing.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of and we can learn a lot just by studying someone else.

1. Are your competitors constantly engaging with their audience?
2. What are they posting about?
3. When are they posting?
4. How often are they posting?
5. What channels are they using and are they staying consistent?

These are all questions you could be asking when looking at what your competition is doing and how they are staying on top.

Once you have this knowledge, you can identify what makes your brand stand out from your competition.

Then make sure your audience knows it. Think about how you can present your brand in a unique way that would benefit your customer. After all, it’s all about them.

You’re not appealing to your target audience

So, you think you have some high-quality posts and you’re stuck wondering why your campaigns are failing. The answer could quite possibly be that your posts are not appealing to your target audience.

I’m sure you know who your target audience (and if not, it’s time to define that).

But, have you taken the time to identify what they like and think as knowledge and useful information?

Sometimes what you may think is cool might not work for others.

Ways to combat this is looking at hashtags or topics that people are talking about in your industry. BuzzSumo is a great tool to use to find about the topics trending based on a certain keyword.

It’s also important to look at when you are posting. This is something that is oftentimes overlooked but can have a big impact on whether your content is seen.

Study your posts to see when the most engagement occurs and post at these times. You can also check out this article about the best times to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

Forgetting to measure your results

This may be the most important aspect of your social media training. According to a study by eMarketer in 2015, 60% of small business owners were not able to track ROI from their social media activities.

If you have no metrics in place and aren’t taking the time to analyze your results, you may never get to the bottom of what’s causing your campaigns to fail.

Most companies will use the tools built-in Twitter or Facebook to measure performance but this can only tell you so much. Only 22% of businesses use dedicated social media measurement platforms (like Google Analytics).

If there is a budget for it, this definitely something to look into.

Tools like these will allow you to take a deeper look into what’s actually causing your campaigns to fail. We can’t just focus on our followers, likes and engagement. Rather, what posts are converting to leads.

Metrics indicate what exactly caused your campaign to fail. Time should be put in analyzing and then using your newly gained insights to make the changes necessary to see results.

Take action

If you could relate to any of these factors described above, it’s time to audit your social media process in order to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.

It could be one little thing that’s holding you back or it could be many. Use this social media training guide to get your company back on track with increased ROI.

What are some ways you see companies failing with social media? We’d love to hear your opinions!