Showing posts with label Social Media Mistakes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Media Mistakes. Show all posts

Monday, July 7, 2025

Social Media Mistakes YOUR Company Makes?


Over 90% of medium and large businesses have used social media in their marketing for five years or longer. Yet the CMO Survey reveals that nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments..



That’s why, no matter what your social media strategy is, it’s always a good idea to go back and make sure you have the basics covered. Your company may discover that it needs a strategic do-over.

Philip Kotler once said, “You should never go to battle before you’ve won the war on paper.” But countless businesses have done just that with social media. Although 97% of Fortune 500 corporations are on LinkedIn, 84% are on Facebook, and 86% are on Twitter, many brands entered the social media front lines without a clear strategy. Social was an add-on to existing plans —- another outlet to deliver the marketing message. Later, marketers found themselves working backward to connect their social strategy to business strategy, as managers demanded greater proof of ROI.

There are a few common mistakes that marketers make with social media. The first is to start with social media objectives. Marketers take a channel such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and then set goals for raising their numbers of likes, comments, and shares. This approach sounds like it makes sense, but it can trap you in a social media–only perspective. After all, how much is that like, comment, or share actually worth to your business? Unless you connect your social media actions to broader business goals from the beginning, ROI can be elusive, and social media becomes an end unto itself.



The second mistake is to limit your brand presence to the most popular social media channels.

Success often depends on having a multichannel social media strategy. Yet only two-thirds of the Fortune 500 (66%) are using YouTube, under half are on Instagram (45%), just over one-third (36%) have corporate blogs, and one-third (33%) are on Pinterest. If you are not using these or other platforms, you could be missing out on valuable business opportunities.

For example, research has found that 93% of Pinterest users plan purchases on the platform and 87% have made a purchase after seeing a product they liked. Other platforms, such as Snapchat, may be the ideal place to reach certain demographics (say, Millennials). Instagram has played an integral role in helping to lift sales for brands including Gatorade. And businesses that have prioritized blogging are 13 times more likely to receive positive ROI.

So how do you ensure that your social media efforts are aligned with what matters to your company — and that you are positively contributing to the bottom line? Start by basing your social strategy on business objectives, then follow that by thinking about target market, social media platforms, tools, and metrics.



Different organizational objectives and target markets may require very different channels and tools.

Don’t simply set goals for higher follower or engagement metrics in the brand’s current social media accounts. Those platforms may be wrong for your business objectives; channels you aren’t on may be better for what you’re trying to accomplish.

To identify the most meaningful business objectives, ask some questions: What numbers must you hit? How will you know you are successful? How does your boss judge success? What has changed recently that is challenging you? What do stakeholders care about most? Business objectives can vary wildly, from increasing sales, generating leads, or improving customer satisfaction to raising awareness, soliciting donations, or gaining volunteers. Thus your objectives should not be social media–focused, such as “Within six months, we should grow our number of fans and increase engagement on Facebook by posting a minimum of five times a week.” That’s a tactic, not a clear goal. A good objective could be “Increase awareness of the brand by 20% for people ages 18–24 within six months.” Hootsuite suggests that real business goals often come from business conversions, brand awareness, and customer experience.



When considering platforms, think carefully about which you should be on — and which you shouldn’t.

Remember that simply increasing your activity on current platforms may not bring you closer to meeting business objectives. Achieving a better ROI may require closing social accounts that are not aligned with business objectives, or even decreasing social action to focus on posts of more substance. Buffer Social, for example, recently got better results by posting less, not more, on Facebook.

Once you’ve identified your objectives and selected the right platforms, you have to create content that the audience will value. Solve a problem they’re facing, deliver a timely message, or just put a smile on their face. Stories that evoke emotion tend to perform better than straight sales messages. Even paid social media posts merely buy reach; the content itself must be engaging enough to draw action beyond a view. Plus, valuable content often gets shared, increasing your reach even further. And don’t simply post the same content to all your social accounts — customizing the content and scheduling for each channel will get better results.



Yet content only gets you so far. Much of social media ROI is earned in responding to customers.

Sprout Social has found that brands reply to only one in 10 social messages that require a response. This is a huge missed opportunity, since helpful replies to even negative comments can improve your brand image, reach new customers, and increase the likelihood that customers will buy again. Depending on your industry, you may need the customer service department to get involved. Don’t forget, social is a two-way medium.

Next, ensure you have the right tools in place to manage your social media efforts. To measure success, brands need tools that can monitor, publish, and track the appropriate analytics. They also need to integrate social media across departments, since it is an increasingly important part of the strategies of many areas of the business. F

or efficiency, you may need tools that can bring together multidisciplinary social teams across department silos.



It’s worth considering tools like Google Analytics, which can break down social traffic to see which efforts are working, ranging from website conversions from a direct sale to email subscription, event registration, or quote requests. Setting up goals with dollar values per conversion can help determine where to focus your time and money beyond followers and likes — connecting social media to the bottom line. Monitoring tools can also track analytics such as sentiment. Too many corporations have seen crisis situations where negative comments in social media led to sales declines and drops in stock price. There are numerous social media analytics software options. Spend some time researching which ones are right for your organization.

Once the right tools are in place, identify and track the metrics that will show the returns on your social media investment. Only when you have done the hard work ahead of time — connecting social action to business objectives — do vanity metrics such as likes and followers become more meaningful. Obviously, you can’t directly connect every social action to a business objective, such as an in-store sale. But you can get close by estimating values. For example, if you know that a percentage of customers who request information on your website purchase a certain product, you can trace the connections by looking at related social media posts and the number of visitors being driven to that call to action page.

Guest Authored By Keith A. Quesenberry. Keith is Assistant Professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA. An expert in social media and digital marketing, he is author of Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution. Follow Keith on X..




If you are struggling to link your company’s social media presence to business goals, you are not alone.

But it is never too late to (re)start at the beginning. Take a step back to ensure you are considering broader business goals and the target market.

Check that you are using the right platforms and are engaging in the right ways. Then make sure you have the necessary tools and metrics in place. It is a lot easier to prove ROI when you have a clear plan for meeting the business’s objectives — and are not simply increasing social action as an end in itself..

    • Authored by:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, AZ. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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    Tuesday, June 24, 2025

    YOUR Business Killing Inspirational Quotes?


    If you're a leader or trying to become one, some degree of ongoing "personal branding" activity is inevitable..

    Related Article: Mistakes To Avoid When Posting To Social Media?


    That often creates pressure to post something new to your social channels on a regular basis -- and therein lies the risk.

    The easiest thing to do might be to share pithy slogans purporting to deliver quick hits of inspiration. After all, it's your job as a leader or aspiring leader to motivate others, right? Right!

    But your #MotivationalMonday tweet or Instagram post with a Gandhi quotation might be backfiring without you realizing it. Here's why, and how to avoid those fluffy expressions.

    Lack Of Clarity Fails To Motivate

    It's hard to be profound on a daily or weekly basis. It's even harder to be profound in just a few quick words.



    Consider this gem from an Instagram account dedicated to motivation:

    Buried beneath that double-negative statement are a few unanswered questions: What does it mean for quotes to "work"? How exactly should you "apply" them?

    Related Article: Mistakes To Avoid When Posting To Social Media?


    Here's another ambiguous one from the same account:



    Who could argue with that? It would be great to learn from every mistake!

    But even the slightly lengthier caption -- instructing you you to "study ways to avoid repeating [mistakes" -- doesn't tell you how to go about doing that.

    Vague statements like these may earn likes from other busy professionals idly scrolling their social feeds, but they won't earn you attention from the people best positioned to help you advance your career.

    Leaders do need to inspire and motivate, but they never succeed by spouting unclear generalities. Powerful communication spurs others to take action through clarity and precision. One reason people don't act is because they're confused or uncertain about what to actually do You can't motivate anyone -- let alone everyone -- to take productive, mission-driven action if you stick to vague platitudes.

    Related Article: Lessons For YOUR Brand On Social Media?


    Superficial Comments Obscure Your Best Ideas

    In order to attract career opportunities or win support for your ideas, you need to offer an original insight or propose a compelling solution to a problem. Shallow, superficial remarks do neither. Take this tweet for example:



    Is this even true?

    If it is, it's great news anyone who's lost a friend, a family member, or even a pet. Does that mean you'll get a better dog next time? Or if you've blown a client opportunity, you'll invariably ace the next one? Obviously not.

    Yes, it's true that "there is nothing more certain than change," as the text of the tweet points out, but not every loss leads to a better opportunity than what came before. This baseless optimism suggests shallow, uncritical thinking -- never a great look when you're trying to advance professionally.

    Same goes for this post:


    "Magic"? "The Universe"? Are these really where effective leaders should place their hopes?

    If anything, the most successful people know how to minimize unnecessary risk, sidestep the sunk-cost fallacy, and cut their losses so they can redirect their energies wherever they'll be better served. Perhaps that's a less "inspirational" idea, but it suggests much more skill, intelligence, and strategy that will likely appeal to your coworkers, employers, and business partners much more than your "stubborn heart" ever will.

    Your best ideas will take more than a few words to lay out, and that's okay. The most difficult challenges out there -- the ones that take real leadership to surmount -- are complex. So while there's an art to speaking about complicated subjects without dumbing them down, your real goal should be to motivate others to engage with complexity, not shy away from it. Tossing out generic remarks that stick to the surface level doesn't help you do that. Worse, it suggests you aren't capable of diving any deeper.



    Rhetoric Should Sharpen Meaning, Not Dull It

    Many of the most commonly shared and liked "motivational" social media posts use snappy turns of phrase. They may sound clever, but more often than not, they bury meaning instead of heightening it. The rhetoric, in other words, hides the substance.

    An especially common device is "antimetabole," which simply means reversing the order of repeated words and phrases. John F. Kennedy used antimetabole in the most famous line of his inaugural address: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." In Kennedy's case, it was a rhetorically powerful way to express an idea about civic service. But if you aren't careful, your twist on this common device might do little more than set up a false opposition.

    Take this tweet for example:




    For one thing, are knowledge and caring mutually exclusive? After a moment's thought, it may strike you that the two are in fact intimately linked.

    After all, caring without knowledge suggests empty emotions; If you're ignorant about something, how can you be expected to care about it in the first place -- let alone know how best to show you care?

    Furthermore, is it even a good idea for people to desire others' empathy without their understanding? It's hard to agree or disagree with an idea that's based on such shaky premises.

    Rhetoric by itself is hollow. It's only effective when it's being used to compress and sharpen an underlying concept. Otherwise, it's just fluff that makes people suspect you don't know what you're talking about, and are trying to hide it.



    Quoting Great Thinkers Doesn't Mean You Understand Them

    Finally, there's a risk that in quoting influential leaders, you'll take their words out of context and diminish their original power -- making yourself look bad in the process.

    This professional quotes Alibaba founder Jack Ma in her LinkedIn headline: "Don't hire the most Qualified candidate. Hire the Craziest." This thought has deep roots in Ma's experience; having been rejected for 30 jobs he applied to after college, including one at KFC, Ma knows that on-paper credentials don't always tell the full story. But taken out of context, his statement doesn't make much sense. In fact, using this quote on your own social media channels might give the impression that you believe in making risky hires or in taking "crazy" risks yourself -- even if you don't.

    Guest Authored By Judith Humphrey. Judith is founder and Chief Creative Officer of The Humphrey Group, a premier leadership communications firm headquartered in Toronto. She is a communications expert whose business teaches global clients how to communicate as confident, compelling leaders. Judith is also the author of two books, Speaking As A Leader: How To Lead Everytime You Speak.(2012) and Taking The Stage: How Women Can Speak Up, Stand Out And Succeed(2014). Follow Judith on X.




    It's always in your better interest to be seen as someone of substance than as an armchair philosopher.

    When in doubt, stick to specifics rather than airy generalities. Ground your social media posts in your own thoughtful observations, drawn from firsthand experience.

    Real leadership rarely comes in greeting card sized bites.

      • Authored by:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, AZ. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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      Monday, May 26, 2025

      Own & Apologize For YOUR Social Media Fail?


      Hootsuite founder and CEO Ryan Holmes is a passionate advocate on the topic of why executives need to be active on social media. But for a brief moment this year, he became a case study in how that can go wrong..

      Since then, Holmes has been trying to be an example of how to respond and recover from a very public embarrassment of his own making. But it turns out that for Holmes, this public pratfall was far from being the most difficult moment during his tenure as CEO.



      During an interview this summer, Holmes said that there have been lots of tough calls he's had to make behind closed doors as he tries to fulfill the lofty expectations facing one of Canada's most notable startups. Chief among them: having to overhaul his entire management team when the company's growth was stalling two years ago.

      "I loved that team that got us to that level," he said. "So it was hard as a leader to say you're not the people to get us to the next level."

      Holmes was in Paris this summer for the Viva Technology conference where he was talking about Hootsuite as well as the publication of his new book, The 4 Billion Dollar Tweet: A Guide for Getting Leaders Off the Social Sidelines.

      The title refers to a tweet from President Trump about cost overruns for new presidential planes that briefly wiped about $4 billion off the market cap of Lockheed Martin. Holmes' message is that executives cannot afford to ignore the conversation happening around their businesses and brands on social media. Rather, they need to be active participants.




      Holmes has always practiced that mantra by developing his own strong presence on social media.

      However, he found himself on the wrong side of this equation in February following the publication of a Bloomberg story that challenged the valuation of Hootsuite.

      Hootsuite was founded in Vancouver in 2008 as the era of social media was coming into full bloom. Hootsuite offered a platform for people and companies to manage their social media presence across the rapidly expanding and evolving landscape of social media services.

      Hootsuite was hot and has raised $246 million in venture capital. Because it was based in Vancouver, it gained extra notoriety in a country hungry for its own startup success stories. Unconfirmed reports had the company riding that momentum toward an IPO, possibly this year.

      Then in February, Bloomberg published an article under the headline "Hootsuite: The unicorn that never was." Hootsuite had a reported valuation above $1 billion after its last round of VC in 2014. The company had neither confirmed nor refuted this. Bloomberg cited sources saying the real valuation was between $700 and $750 million, and implied that Hootsuite executives had been somewhat deceitful about the issue of valuation.



      That prompted this now infamous exchange on Twitter between Holmes and the reporter:


      "I’m not proud of this," he said on stage at Viva Tech. "It was something rash I did."

      Cue social media backlash, made all the more fierce because the culprit, Holmes, was head of a social media company and thus should have known better. "It's an example of what happens when it goes wrong," he said.



      Holmes later apologized for the tweet. He said that was the most important thing he learned from the incident.

      "Own it," he said. "And when you need to apologize, apologize." If there is good news, it's this, according to Holmes: "The news cycle moves on. It does pass."

      If there was another disappointment for Holmes, however, it was that the personal misfire overshadowed the renewed success of Hootsuite. The company has been making big inroads among corporate customers, which has reignited its growth. And it can boast of new partnerships, like the one announced this week to integrate Hootsuite with Adobe's Creative Cloud.



      It's a big turnaround from 2015 when it seemed the Hootsuite growth story had hit a wall.

      Holmes recalled that the company had fallen short for a couple of quarters on its own sales targets. The company was losing out on deals to larger customers and wasn't seeing current customers expanding use of its product.

      "I had an executive team that got us to here in seven years," he said. "It's very few people that could do that. But what I realized after we missed a couple of quarters is that I don't know that we've got the right people at the table. The playbook was used up."

      So he cleared out the executive ranks and started building a whole new team. That also included laying off 65 employees, which led to another brief moment of social media infamy for Holmes.

      On Instagram, he posted a picture of his hand holding a drink with the caption: "Cheers to my homies." What was intended as an homage to the ex-employees was blasted for being insensitive before he took it down.



      Still, the overhaul soon paid off.

      The new executive team included a handful of top names with deep experience in tech and digital media, including a new chief marketing officer who had worked at Juniper Networks and Macromedia; a new chief financial officer from OpenText, Canada's largest publicly traded software company; and a new head of sales who had worked for 20 years at companies such as SAP.

      Hootsuite began ramping up integrations with new services, such as Dropbox. It introduced new pricing packages to target enterprise users. It made some targeted acquisitions. It launched a $5 million developers fund to extend third-party applications for its own platform. And it began focusing even more on international expansion, including opening new offices in Sydney.

      By the middle of 2016, the company said it was cash-flow positive. "We've come out the woods in a really good position," Holmes said.

      That momentum has been helped by the continued shift to digital advertising and the growth of social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.



      "The industry is growing up and budgets are growing," Holmes said. "Brands" understanding of social has come a long way."

      And that was the main message he had in Paris this summer: Executives and brands need to get in the game.

      In a sign of just how fast things continue to evolve, Holmes has speculated that the title of his book may already be dated by recent events. Last week, in a random rant, President Trump tweeted:




      That temporarily sent Amazon's stock tumbling, wiping out about $6 billion on market value. Bad news for Amazon. But it does nicely serve to emphasize Holmes' message about why the financial impact of social media is only going to escalate from here on out.


      Guest Authored By Chris O'Brien. Chris is based in Toulouse, France, where he is conducting a three-year, government-backed study to determine how much cassoulet, butter and wine a single human can consume on a daily basis. Previously, he covered Silicon Valley for 15 years as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times and he still has the talking sock puppet to prove it. Every day, he wonders what would happen if people in Silicon Valley knew how much less expensive it is to live in the south of France.





      “"Own it," Holme's said. "And when you need to apologize.. Apologize!"

      If there is good news, it's this, according to Holmes: "The news cycle moves on. It does pass.."


        • Authored by:
          Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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