Let me share a few examples that highlight the #1 Social Media Mistake and How To Avoid It…
Recently I was consulting with a company on the topic of social media, and they said,
The founder isn’t sure we want to expand our social media effort beyond Facebook”
My response was – ‘what if Facebook closes down your account? You’ve got over 100,000 followers, What if Facebook decides your account is spam or something?’
Their answer?
‘That actually happened last year, and it was a hassle to get it restored’.
A week later I was consulting with another company and they are professional direct response marketers. They were struggling with the idea of jumping into social media and exactly how to do it. They said,
“Why do we need to do social media, we can grow from our existing business contacts in our industry”.
My response – ‘hmmm’. (silent speechlessness).
What’s the thread running through these stories? … And what is the #1 Mistake Social Media Marketers make … and why do social media consultants hate Claude Hopkins? Here it is:
There are proven principles that govern social media – spending money on social media while remaining ignorant of the principles is a massive mistake.
It is not guesswork at this point. If you are foggy in your own mind about how Social Media works, stop spending money on Facebook Ads, and learn the basic lessons. Stop giving tons of money to a social media firm that doesn’t explain to you exactly what works and what doesn’t, (because they don’t know themselves, they just spend your money on Facebook Ads).
Let me share #4 proven principles for Social Media marketing, but first, here is what Claude Hopkins wrote in his classic book, Scientific Advertising (page 1)…
The time has come when advertising [social media] has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct method of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law. Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures. Certainly no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk.
- Social Media Is An Effective Way To Spread Your Message, (a duh-ism at this point for many, but oddly, many more still question this fact).
- Being on just one social media platform is a very risky strategy for countless reasons – and if the one you’re on is Facebook it is the riskiest of all.
- The proven concepts in one social media platform are largely transferable to other social media platforms. That’s why we have 1.4 million video views in Youtube, and 14,000 Facebook Fans, and 3,000 Pinterest followers.
- There are true experts in this industry that are mastering techniques that can be replicated. The Ad I’m using in this post for example is a direct (style) copy of an Ad run by the Pimsleur Academy that has been tested and refined countless times. Why try to re-invent the wheel?
These lessons, and tons more are being documented, boiled down, refined, and perfected. Bottomline, get scientific and stop speculating what works.
Ps. if you’re a marketer with a solid social media budget, and you want to learn the social media lessons that really work, so you can stop wasting money on Facebook Ads, contact me. I have a coaching program that you can jump into that will radically revamp your efforts. You might not like what I tell you, but it will be the truth well explained.
marketingonpinterest.com 
Great image, Jason 🙂
To play devil’s advocate here, what evidence is there that social media is an effective way to spread a brand’s message? How do we know the ROI of a given social media channel will make it worth allocating resources to, versus other marketing channels?
Hi Matt,
Good questions. A couple thoughts. First, Google Analytics will tell you the direct traffic from a given social media platform. Combining GA data with your online sales data (if you’re an ecommerce company) will tell you the value of a visit, as well as the value of a unique visitor. That is what you might call your ‘site average’. Then you apply that to your social media channel visits number. If you have 20,000 visitors from Pinterest, and you know the value of a visitor is 50 cents, you know that Pinterest delivered $10,000 directly. And you can assume it helped you beyond that amount in soft metric ways. But I’d caution anyone allocating money (i.e. Facebook Advertising money) to any social media channel until they learn the fundamentals of social media, which is the point of this article. You don’t need a budget to be effective in social media, you need social media training. Then the budget can add additional value after the fundamentals are set. You can see a company that doesn’t understand this by looking across their social platforms – hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, and 133 Youtube subscribers. That tells you they are simply using FB Advertising to buy fans in Facebook, but don’t understand how to make things work in other social channels. No senior marketing manager should allow this to occur. Hope that helps clarify the idea of this article 🙂
Thanks Jason. To add to your points, I think it’s important to take into account the time employees spend engaging on social media as part of the cost of that channel and assess ROI on that basis.