Game of Thrones is back for its 7th season. I am a fan and like millions of other fans, I associate myself with the good guys & girls in the show.
I also have a vivid imagination. One of the questions I asked myself recently was "If I were a character in the Game of Thrones, who would it be?"
I immediately knew the answer and here are my reasons.
The back story before the gory outcome
I started Jodi Logik back in September 2015.
Like any enthusiastic entrepreneur, I just imagined that if you provide great content, customers will come flocking to my social media pages.
Here are four embarrassing mistakes I made on social media at my own cost. If you are a first-time entrepreneur, print this article and frame it.
Disclaimer: No VC or Angel Investor was ever harmed in my social media adventures!
1. If you build it, they will come!
If you are a movie buff, you probably have seen “Field of Dreams”. In this movie, Kevin Costner builds a baseball field, right in the middle of his corn, field in order to bring back dead baseball players to start playing again!
That’s precisely the strategy I had for my Facebook page in the beginning!
Alas, I am no Kevin Costner.
While he managed to get all the ghosts to play on his field, watching audience engagement on my Facebook page was as exciting as watching paint dry!
But I did try.
I mustered enough courage to advertise for a social media manager (or should I say I was looking for my Melisandre?) who will sprinkle some magic dust on my Facebook page.
But you will be surprised to hear about where I posted my rather brilliant ad for the social media manager.
You may not be able to guess this, but my ad for a social media manager was posted on the Facebook page that nobody ever visited!
Here is the actual screenshot from the ad.
My family members promptly liked it and unfortunately, none of them turned out to be social media managers.
2. Write great content and let Google do the rest!
Some of the social media experts that I ended up reading about gave me yet another piece of advice that resulted in something more exciting happening to me.
Remember, I was enjoying the thrill of watching paint dry and anything else I did was bound to be more exciting!
So I decided to roll up my sleeve and started churning out one new blog post every day. That’s not all, I did my keyword research and all my blog posts were “high-quality” content designed to permanently occupy the first place on the google search results page.
Somebody forgot to tell me that coming up with great content was just one of the three dozen factors that go into the Google search algorithm. If that was not the case, Google search engine will have a serious case of an ethical dilemma.
Imagine a mother feeding a dozen children and she has only one meat pie left.
Unfortunately, Google is not your mother and she will gladly leave you in the company of other "high-quality content" beyond the frozen wall of the first page of search results.
Just see where some of my blog posts showed up.
3. Hashtag dreaming!
As an outsider, Twitter is this insanely cool tool that can topple governments, make heroes out of ordinary people and help brands become household names.
However, it’s probably more like Che Guevara – Everybody wears a T-shirt with his photo on it, but nobody knows anything about him!
I started dabbling in Twitter hoping that my incisive wit and sarcasm will win over the hordes and see my brand take off among the Tweeps and unite the seven kingdoms in the process.
But I soon realised that my Twitter skills were way worse that Hodor's vocabulary!
I did not know that Twitter works just like any other social media platform. It’s not Sweden or any Nordic country where everybody gets everything. My strategy was to come up with funny tweets and a little bit of trolling.
Just look at what I had after a bloody battle on Twitter.
4. Oh! Who can ignore LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram?
If you ever saw the Avengers, it’s very clear. One superhero is absolutely no good.
You need all the superheroes and superheroines to fight your battle to win the hearts and the minds of your customers and save them from your evil competitors.
I decided to single-handedly conquer LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.
But alas, the realities of running product management, product engineering, fund raising, accounting, and marketing ensured that I could get started on LinkedIn, created an account on Instagram, and left Pinterest untouched for a better day (that’s called tactical withdrawal).
My LinkedIn company page has all of 2 followers.
Guess who’s following my company?
Of course, it’s me and a somebody else who was held hostage till he liked the page.
Summary
I am Stannis Baratheon when it comes to social media marketing. I had lots of bad advice, made foolish moves, and marched to one defeat after another.
In summary, let me do one more walk of shame to help drive home the key mistakes I made with my botched social media efforts.
1. Social media marketing should not be a side job for entrepreneurs. It’s a full-time job that deserves respect and time. I just assumed that I can churn out viral hits single-handedly.
2. I never bothered to cultivate any relationship with key influencers. I also never understood the fact that getting influencers on your side requires cash money and of course great content.
3. I just assumed that social media platforms were built to “empower” weaker sections of the society like first-time entrepreneurs! Every social media platform is in the business of making money. Yes, they all want brands to spend money on their platform and have designed their products to make money. Understanding this upfront will save you a lot of time and effort.
4. I never used FREE job boards to hire social media experts. Instead, I hoped they will find me! Sounds ridiculous now. In hindsight, a lot of what I have done with my life sounds ridiculous.
I refused to spend a paisa and so did not worry about ROI. Bad idea. Even if you don’t spend money on social media, you should always keep an eye on “Return on Effort”. It’s either ROI or ROE.
Share your social media goof-ups in the comments below. I would like to see if anyone else can top the embarrassing mistakes I made.