“Why Isn’t My Social Media Working?”

Let me start off by saying that the whiny baby in the picture is not to imply that YOU are a whiny baby if your social media actions, strategy and/or plans don’t appear to be working.

I’m flat out saying it. Because I love you.

I’m not, like, IN LOVE with you or anything like that. I mean more like a human being, who shares in your dreams, and occasionally, your misery. And if you love someone, in situations like this one, you tell them the truth.

(In situations like, “did you finish the potato chips?” you lie. But I totally didn’t finish them. There’s another bag in the pantry. I saw it.)

So back to our topic.

Social media – which really isn’t called social media anymore – works. You can dispute it if you’d like, but I am hereby officially positing the theory that if your social media efforts aren’t working, it’s not because the technology sucks, or your dog ate it, or Facebook is for losers, or Twitter is for techies, or YouTube is for people with no life.

No, homie, the problem is what you’re doing.

It would be the height of jerkiness for me to call you a whiner whose mama dresses you funny if I didn’t pose some solutions to the issue you’re facing.

(I’m still kind of a jerk for doing that. But I haven’t had my coffee yet. It gets better.)

So here are some of my thoughts. Not that I’m a doctor or anything like that. But my social media IS working. By that I mean it brings me traffic, publicity or other types of attention that I then turn into money.

The Top 5 Reasons You Think (Correctly or Not) That Your Social Media Efforts Aren’t Working.

1. You don’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

It doesn’t make your hair shinier.

It can’t buy you a new dog.

And it doesn’t make money jump up into your pocket.

Social media, to put it simplistically, makes information easier to move around, share and engage with. Yes, you can make money through your business efforts in social media. No, you can’t do it by applying old world marketing to the new media paradigm.

But you CAN connect the principles of marketing to the back end of social media.

You can have a blog that engages, and blog posts that aren’t sales pages. Then you can have a subscription box on every page, which leads to the first part of your sales funnel. And you can do it without pissing people off, too.

2. You aren’t measuring the right thing.

I have a friend who insists on doing things like putting a bit.ly link in his profile, putting obvious affiliate links on his profile and leaving signature links on his intrusive posts to other people’s walls in Facebook.

He looks like a fool.

I’ve told him as much.

But he insists that he’d rather get .01% of people he can track to click on his links now and buy today, than 30% of people he can’t track to do business with him in the next 90 days.

If that is your approach to social media, you are Insane.

As in, you need medication, not like an insult. Literally have someone examine your head.

It’s this approach that kills most social media efforts. Why not put some Google Analytics code (or some other way to track the origin of clicks) on your OWN site. No, it won’t track people who get an email or hear about your link because of a Facebook friend and save it to their bookmarks.

But it will get more people clicking. Folks like to know where a link is going to take them. And not everyone knows how to use tools that circumvent bit.ly and other URL shorteners.

3. You aren’t doing things that get people’s attention, and keeps it.

Bland content saved to delicious.com is still bland content. I know because I have written ten times the bland content as I have original, engaging pieces that people find useful.

You’ve got to find a different way to say it, or say something different that is closer to what your audience, your future customers, want to hear. Then you’ve got to do it in a way that makes them tell someone, and want to come back for more themselves.

If you can’t figure out how to do it, hire someone.

But try first. Honestly it’s not that hard.

4. You’ve got great content, but you’re not distributing it.

Great content that’s sitting on your site without being noticed is just as useless as bland content. Are you syndicating it via RSS? Are you emailing your subscribers when you have a worthwhile post? Have you turned the popular posts into podcasts?

Get your content out where it can be followed back to your site.

5. You’ve got great content, you’re distributing it, but your audience isn’t engaged enough to care.

Okay, you’re awesome. I know it. But you only tell me once a month. And when you tell me and then I comment back how super you are, you ignore me. So then I figure, why retweet it? So and so is a super-douche who doesn’t care anyway, why should I?

That’s not to say that you have to spend your life answering every single piece of communication in real time. We’re not all the Old Spice Guy.

But you can do your best to get in contact with your former, present and future customers, on multiple channels, in a way they’ll appreciate. You can update on a regular basis. You can say thank you for the retweets you get. You can find content at their sites to retweet too, or comment on.

My overall theory is this.

If I give you a toolbox, and there’s a hammer in it, if you use that tool to do anything but bang a nail into place, its effectiveness is going to go way down.

But you’d be crazy to say the hammer isn’t working if you’re using it to put on eyeliner. And if I’m going to call myself your friend – nay, a decent human being – I have to strongly advise you to stop doing that, any way I can.