You know what they say about mistakes: Everyone makes them. That holds true in social media as well. But if we start fearing that a particular social media stratagem might fail and that fear leads us to stop experimenting, that would be the biggest mistake of all.
The more you start restraining yourself on social media or on any platform while marketing a brand, the more breaking out of those restraints feels like an insurmountable endeavor.
Regretting mistakes may just pave a way to the doom of your business, and everlasting regret is one territory you don't want to explore.
So, here's a look at the silver linings of mistakes made in social media.
You can usually find something from within the carnage that worked
Your last social media program may have been a disaster, but maybe something can make results look a little more hopeful. There must have been something that paid its dues. Unless you created that program in your sleep, you must have formulated a thread that didn't snap. Find what worked.
Running a campaign on the social media pages for any brand is never short on challenges. Some issues are small enough to be blatantly ignored, and others are large enough to make you lose you sleep—but you managed to deal with them effectively. Evaluate your campaign and the ensuing results to identify those not-so-disastrous parts that you can use in your future attempts with a greater degree of desirable results.
In online marketing, you may not meet the adequate or the expected results, but you have covered some distance.
You stop being afraid of failure
The more proactive you are, the more equipped you are to sail over the failures quicker than you expected. When you are involved in a campaign, it is imperative that you dole out ideas aggressively, as it allows you to try out multiple things and experiment with a greater deal of assurance; you have something to fall back to in the event you run into a wall.
Fearing about the results is natural, especially when we have invested far too much effort and far too many resources on building something. Poor results can lead to thought paralysis (which emanates from fear and leads to greater fear). That's where the final nail is pushed in.
Those among us who have been there and done that won't let these discrepancies bog us down. We'll continually move forward. I have observed blogs like Leisure Martini that keep experimenting with its social media strategies, and despite being a beginner, it has made its experiments count. That's because when your eyes are set on that "final objective," an undying, non-fearing spirit will lead you to it.
You can have a second (or third or fourth) chance
There isn't a common denominator to everything on social media. You've invested logical thinking and resources into building a plan, so there is no reason why your plan shouldn't be given a second chance, despite being a disaster on the first go.
Moreover, social media is unpredictable. A little change here, a little molding there, and the failed program may be raring to go.
You can run variations of the same social media campaigns (successful and failed ones) to see how they fare for a different client. The plans, its resources, and the efforts that fueled it are never wasted. It is the haplessness of the doer who doesn't take chances that tosses those efforts into the waste bin.
* * *
Getting things done and getting them done in a manner most effective is what all boils down to in the end. You won't succeed in everything you do, but you become more capable of handling failures and planning for the next success.
