Ron Johnson
Social media is everywhere, and everybody seems to be using it to one degree or another. We see a lot of business-based social media pages that aren’t accomplishing what those businesses likely had in mind when they started the accounts. In fact, we see a growing trend of highly ineffective social media campaigns. There are so many, we figured maybe ineffectiveness is what some businesses are after.
For this reason, we want to accommodate any business or organization that wishes to fail at social media. Success in this arena isn’t simple, and neither is failure – there are some key secrets you have to know to enable your social media campaigns to predictably fall flat. Here are five of those secrets.
SECRET #1. Get your pages set up, then move on.
As you know, the key to social media is simply to be on it. So a great place to start failing big is to set up your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other accounts and then never do anything with them.
This is important, because if you start building a following and putting up posts (especially relevant ones!), people are going to start paying attention and possibly sharing what you have to say with others. If you’re going to fail at social media, the last thing you need is all that extra exposure.
SECRET #2. It’s social – you can post anything.
If you’re going to update your social media pages, make sure you post things that have nothing to do with your business. Put up funny cat videos. Or how about that video of the ditzy blonde on The Newlywed Game that made you laugh so hard?
The cool thing about this tactic is that your readers (while you still have some) will love sharing all your cool videos as your business loses credibility day by day. Result: definite social media fail.
SECRET #3. Never include your social links in your email signature.
It always amazes us when we see people who are bound and determined to fail at social media add social links or icons within their e-mail signatures.
The best practice for social media failure where links are concerned is to make people have to go searching for your places in the social arenas. Don’t give them any hints. Be as invisible as possible. People know how to use Google – let them start there when wanting to hunt you down.
SECRET #4. Wing it, they’ll grow and manage themselves.
Those who fail to plan can plan to fail. Therefore not having a plan for your social media pages is an excellent way to fail.
The last thing you need is to spend time building and managing social media accounts. You’ll be amazed at the level of failure you can achieve in no time at all.
SECRET #5. Best practice: forget social media all together.
If none of the above tips seem like they’ll help you fail at social media as profoundly as you want to, here’s the best tip of all: Just forget about social media all together.
We don’t claim to know everything about online marketing, but we do know for sure that if you don’t exist in cyberspace, you’ll never have to mess with managing new customers, creating new lines of communication, expressing your company’s brand and revealing new products or services. Being invisible is the best sure-fire way to fail at social media.
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