Five fatal social media errors to avoid

I just spotted an article over at marketing profs from Maria Ford covering 5 fatal social media errors, and how to avoid them (via @samirbalwani).

The article points out that too-often social media is tacked onto a campaign, without thought of an end-end strategy.

This results in a flood of communications - but without the engagement we really need. We’re all suffering from communications overload - so as marketeers, the more we can do to tune the message and the audience, the better targeted we can be.

To summarize the suggestions (rather than the errors) from the post:-

  1. Profile your target audience to determine the best channel to reach them (rather than spamming via all channels). Users on twitter / facebook / LinkedIn are likely to be interested in slightly different things.
  2. Assign ownership of messages - so that one person determines how best to get the message out to all audiences (rather than everyone broadcasting their own tweet or LinkedIn updates, causing a lot of duplication).
  3. Select the best channels for the message (RSS, email newsletter, LinkedIn, facebook), rather than sending the same message through every channel
  4. Provide a single destination web-page that everyone can get the whole story - and link to it from each message
  5. Consider the pros and cons of each channel before using, rather than just using social media because it’s free. It might not always be the best solution.

Read the full article here.