What Should You Do If Your Social Media Program Doesn’t Produce Your Expected Results?

This one happens more often than not.

Time, effort, and money going into crafting a surefire, guaranteed not-to-fail, social media program and what happens?

It fails or yields somewhat less than spectacular results.

What’re you suppose to do about it?

Lets talk about that!

How Does This Happen?

There are many reasons for a social media program failing to deliver.

Here’re a few of the more common ones:

1. Not well thought out
2. Unrealistic expectations
3. Poor execution
4. Changing external conditions
5. There can be any number of reasons.

The important thing to do after you realize that your social media program isnt working for you is to do something about it!

(You’d be surprised how many folks overlook this step!)

What to Do about It?

First, off stop doing what you’re doing.

(Einstein’s definition of insanity applies here. You know, “To keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insanity.” I wonder if Old Albert ever thought that line would be even more famous than his Theory of Relativity?)

Next, go back through what you’re doing, look at your underlying assumptions (You did make those right?) and look for deviations.

Ask yourself, What did you miss?

Sometimes the answer is obvious, often times its not.

(Yeah, OK, I get it that that line isn’t too helpful!)

That’s when you start using A/B testing.

(Actually, if you’d been using this from the beginning then you probably wouldn’t be in this fix now.)

Experiment with different variables in your program and measure the results.

Any better? Any worse?

Yes, this is trial and error, but this is how you learn, the hard way!

Observations

The first step in fixing a problem is recognizing that you have one.

(Again, something that many folks are reluctant to do.)

Doubling down with more money, time, and effort will not fix a broken process.

Trust me on this!

My other recommendation is to avoid the blame game.

Focus on the why not the who now.

Therell be time later to determine who, if anyone, may be at fault.

Social media is more an art than a science.

There are no silver bullets and getting results with social media takes time.

That being said, when somethings going off the rails, the time to act is now not later.

And I’ll repeat before I leave you, having a well laid out social media program especially around its assumptions and metrics to be followed afterwards will go a long way towards helping you with any glitches that may arise during its execution.

Even a good plan can have problems, knowing how to recognize them and how to respond can go a long way to alleviating the situation.

That’s it for now!

Please check-out my 8 step approach for developing a social media program to get some more ideas on how to use social media.

Also, never forget to reach out to either ask questions or to ask for help from someone like myself!

In the meantime, thank you for following and reading my blog!

I look forward to any and all comments that you may have. I will reply to any comments made to this blog post as promptly as I can.

And, remember!

I do this for a living and if I can be of any assistance to either you or your organization, please feel free to call on me. Our initial discussion will be of no charge to you.