What Should You Do When a Social Media Platform Fails?

By thought-horizon | Jul 30, 2019

Author Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus tempus mi diam, a sollicitudin tortor bibendum eu. Donec porta ex in semper finibus. Nunc cursus vehicula fringilla. Pellentesque pretium lacus in vehicula lobortis. Pellentesque sed varius risus, nec feugiat dolor. Sed molestie tincidunt fermentum. Morbi ultricies laoreet velit, at lacinia urna congue vitae. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. In dui lectus, ultrices rutrum magna fringilla, elementum suscipit felis. Phasellus molestie porta risus.

Just last week I was speaking with one of our best clients. They have incredible click-through rates and drive hundreds of thousands of social impressions per week. But at the meeting I attended, they were focusing on their lack of engagement on Twitter. This prompted me to write this blog on what to do when a social media channel fails your business.

1. Dig Deeper

What problem are you going to solve if you don’t even have an idea about what that problem is? Simply revamping your social selling strategy without having an idea of what the problem actually is is like trying to hit a bull’s eye in the complete dark. While there are just faint chances of hitting the target, there are also chances that you are long away from achieving it, thanks to the blind target.

By calling a level of engagement ‘failing,’ you may be ignoring what is actually possible. It could be that one channel allows for more engagement. In other words, it may not be your fault and your “terrible” numbers might not be all that bad. It could just be that that social media platform is going through one of its bad days.

2. Is Your Target Audience Even There?

Buyers are arguably vital to businesses, and they are the ones who make your audience on social. You cannot assume one of the platforms to be fruitful for any specific reason. Some platforms are notoriously empty for certain target buyers. In other words, your buyers are on that platform anyway, so why worry? This shouldn’t be used as a rationalization, but consider this before sinking time and energy into amping up a failing social platform.

3. Trends Keep Changing

Platforms keep moving the goalposts. Social media platforms keep reinventing their algorithms to keep up with the changing world. They try to implement new things in order to suit their needs, and this can be miserable for anyone looking for positive results on that platform.

For example, Instagram had already implemented delinking in the caption – meaning, you cannot add hyperlinks to the photo captions. But by the time people knew after a great fall in traffic from Instagram, it was already old news.

You cannot always tell, but looking at the results of non-related businesses and individuals on these platforms can be instructive to identify a trend that may indicate a platform-wide movement.

4. Be Ready for Changes

Don’t underestimate the fact that you might be right. Too many times I see people online, bashing a social platform’s change of algorithms, when all the data points toward there not being anything new going on – other than you performing poorly this month.

The approach to curb this is simple: live and die by the data and be ready to ask “What happened?” and adjust content and tactics accordingly to make next month’s numbers better.

Take Home Message

Social media platform failure is daunting. You exhaust yourself pushing content, results don’t show up, and you keep wondering why. And later, it only turns out a major platform failure. Ensure that does not take your strategy down the drain. Simply get yourself sorted on the above-mentioned points, and great things will follow.