Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
The main mistake in your social media marketing
I'll start this with a disclaimer: Your biggest big mistake in social media marketing would be ignoring or not doing social media marketing at all. Since you however are reading this post I assume you are free of that mistake. Thus I will go on talking about the main mistake you are likely to make when you are in social media and you are utilising it in marketing.
When I was conducting interviews and studying how companies are utilising social media in their business to business marketing back in 2009 for my bachelor's thesis one of the subjects that got mentioned over and over again was benchmarking. Benchmarking is basically a process of comparing your business and it's performance to other companies in order to find out best practices. In this case the representatives of companies were reluctant with social media marketing since there were no or very little benchmarking examples for them. What they were saying was they had trouble with utilising social media in business to business marketing because there weren't enough examples of how to do it. They wanted someone to take the lead and create those examples for them.
Examples are great. They give us an idea of things we should and shouldn't do. Examples show the mistakes and they show the successes. And examples are bad too. When you only follow the examples you try to copy the success of someone else. It fails, because your situation, timing, products, brand and clients or other target group members are different than those of your example. For instance the other company or person may have got started when there wasn't that much competition on their field. When you start in that same field after them you are in a whole different position. Your timing and situation are already different than theirs.
The biggest social media marketing mistake you do is to rely on examples and benchmarking too much. Years back when very few people and even fewer companies were using social media they had room for their message. Now that your mom, boss and their horse are on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else there's more noise than anything else. When you follow the lead of other noisemakers you will only create more noise, which won't stand out. When you try something new, something no others are doing, you will all of a sudden be above the noise. When you do as others do you will be playing it safe. You may even succeed with it, but copying leaves you behind from the beginning. If you want to be the leader everyone else will benchmark and copy you will have to do something different. You will have to lead and make the examples, not to follow and do what everyone else has done.
In order to succeed as the leader you will need a couple of ingredients. The first ingredient is imagination. Imagination will let you create something new, in this case come up with new ways to market yourself, your products or brand with social media. It doesn't have to be some sort of grand new thing, it start as a small difference between you and your competition. The second and most important ingredient is courage. You will have to be a bit mad if you want to utilise your imagination. You will have to be courageous enough not to fear for failures and to do something else than all the others. In Finnish there's a word for this, hullunrohkea. It appears to be often translated as foolhardy or temerarious, but those words don't quite capture the meaning. It means something like crazy/mad courageous. That's what you must be.
Doing your social media marketing differently than all the examples and best practices without excessive benchmarking requires trial and error. It is scary and so many things can go wrong. Playing it safe seems like a sure way not to make mistakes, though mistakes are likely to still happen. And playing it safe is a sure way to let someone else take the lead. Why would you want to give the lead to someone else when you can lead yourself? Your main mistake in social media marketing is to follow instead of doing your own thing and taking your own path.
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