How to Fail and Succeed with Social Media?

There are two components that dictate our failure or success with pretty much anything in life - our thought process and our actions provided we have the ability to execute. Success happens when our thought process and actions align with our goals. Needless to say, failure happens when our thought process and actions do not align with our goals.

Success happens when our thought process and actions align with our goals.

In this blog post, we will explore what kind of thought process and actions result into failure or success when it comes to social media.

How to Fail in Social Media?

Thought process that leads to social media failure

• Social media is something we do only because our boss asked us to.
• Social media is something we do only because our customers asked us to.
• I have so much to do already, how am I going to find time to create new content?
• It's always better to get on new social networks, especially the ones gaining popularity.

Actions that lead to social media failure

• Abandoning social media accounts
• Not engaging in conversations
• Creating new content once-in-a-blue-moon
• Creating useless content
• Every status update is a sales pitch
• Not measuring metrics

Now that we know how to fail in social media, let's find out what we can do to succeed.

How to Succeed in Social Media?

Thought process that leads to social media success

• I should leverage social media to get more out of my existing sales, marketing, customer service and business development strategies.
• If I delegate some of my tasks, I will have time to create content.
• Look at all the content I have from my brochures, seminars, articles and website. I can recycle it in different formats and feed it to my social networks.
• I need to identify which social media network will let me share my story in a great way. This way, I can spend the majority of my "social media" time on it, growing my following.
• Everyone is talking about this new social media network. I wonder how effectively can I tell my story on it? How can I test it's suitability to my goals quickly and inexpensively?
• How can I measure my ROI effectively to figure out what works and what does not work?

Actions that lead to social media success

• Regularly updating social media accounts with relevant, helpful content created by you and others.
• Engaging into conversations.
• Reaching out to other so you can create conversations with them.
• Sending marketing messages only once in a while.
• Tracking and measuring all social media efforts to learn where to improve.
• Building a large following on a single social network and then leveraging it to build other networks.
• Integrating social media on website / blog. (Read my post on 5 Levels of Social Media Integration for ideas)

Most importantly, you need to like social media to succeed at it. If you don't like it, you won't believe it in and it will become a chore that will be abandoned quickly.

Actions are always driven by thought process. If you find yourself thinking like the points listed in the "failure" section, I hope you get determined to change your thought-process. If you find yourself thinking like the points listed in the "success" section, Congratulations! I hope many great things come your way.

And lastly, what would you add to or remove from the lists above?

Have a great day,
Mayur

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