With so many so-called social media gurus out there, it’s hard for mere mortals not to have “imposter syndrome.”
Should we be trusted with others’ social media accounts? Should call ourselves an expert on our Website if we’re not perfect?
The truth is, even the most experienced social media managers have made at least one gigantic mistake in their careers. Here are seven professionals with their tales to back me up.
A few years back I met a prospective client whose budget for managing Facebook only allowed for management, not for advertising. At the intake meeting I addressed this concern, as well as the fact that there was barely any content on their website so there was very little content for me to use.
Despite this, they offered me my going management rate, and I accepted the six month project. To date, this has been my biggest fail.
I got no traction; no engagement and no new likes on the Facebook page. I didn’t have a budget to create video content or run ad campaigns or even run a contest.
Then I did something I am not proud of. As a last-ditch effort in the last two months, I took a portion of my fee to run a few ads to see if throwing a bit of money would in the end make a difference. It didn’t.
To off-set and justify me taking money out of my own pocket, all posts in those last two months were recycled posts from the previous months. The Facebook page was a fail and so was working with this client. This experience served as a lesson to me to go with my gut to not take on clients who ‘want it all’ but aren’t willing to spend the money to get there.
Back in 2010, I was fairly new to social media management and was in charge of a financial services page with a high international fan count but low engagement.
I decided that I would run a social media contest to increase likes, shares, and overall engagement. Back then, I wasn’t really aware of the need to use page apps to run contests. Contest apps are an absolute must, not only for legally collecting data, but also for regulating entries and ensuring that users adhere to the terms and conditions of your contest. I had no idea.
So my contest was as follows. “Take a great photo of you holding the company logo and the one with the most likes will win” (another Facebook page violation). The idea was to show fans around the world and the prize was a top of the range Canon camera. Of course, the fans started submitting photos to the page and at the beginning it was great. Beautiful photos of India, Italy, Australia, all with our company logo.
I was pretty pleased with myself.
But then, I noticed that some of the photos were getting an insane amount of likes. If the average on each photo was 50, these were getting 10,000. I realized that they were using bots to bump up their likes to win the prize. With no way to control the number of votes or entries, or any way to prove that the rules had been broken (because I hadn’t written any), I sat helplessly watching as some of the least inspiring photos gained thousands of likes.
When the time came to announce the winner, the photo was an obviously photoshopped background of the leaning Tower of Pisa with a little guy from Indonesia holding our logo. It was a poor quality and obviously tampered with image. I announced him as the winner and then spent the net week receiving furious messages from the other genuine participants who accused him of faking the photo likes and our brand of not properly controlling the contest.
To make matters worse (again no terms and conditions) the winner then went on to demand a camera with a much higher value than the company wanted to give. Our company lawyers eventually concluded that…
