Social Media Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (5 of 6)

Ok, we’re in the home stretch. Today we’ll talk about the fifth mistake in our top 5 mistakes in social media marketing series. And, you might think that would be the last one, right? But wait, there’s more! We’ll close the series shortly with a special 6th mistake—at no extra charge. I know… Right?

Today’s mistake is trying to apply traditional marketing tactics to social media marketing. This is probably THE most frequent mistake we see. Marketers are trained to control the message, to boil things down to the 3 talking points we want stressed and to answer every question with one of those three. (Trust me, I did it for years when I did political PR work.)

Social media is about facilitating a conversation within a community versus controlling a conversation to a community. Big difference.

It’s natural to start with what you know, which is “We’d like to do a campaign that conveys X and Y.” Good start. To make it work in social media marketing, you have to flip that around. Ask instead:

• “Who cares about X and Y?”,
• “What conversations are already taking place about X and Y?”, and
• “How can we contribute to that conversation in a way that adds value and builds our brand in this space?”

If you get the paradigm shift, you’re on your way to succeeding in social media marketing.