My Top ten social media marketing mistakes

Mistakes I made following other Guru’s advice BEFORE I found Social Traffic

Facebook Mistakes

1. Friend everyone that they find on their favorite gurus friends list or group without so much as explaining why they are friending them. I actually said where I saw them on most of the friend requests.

2. Accept friend requests from people like the ones above –if someone isn’t interested enough in you to tell you where they met you then the odds are you will never have a real conversation. Most of my real interactions on Facebook are with people I’ve at least talked to on Skype.

3. Slap up a group and start inviting everyone in my friends list. – worked a little, but I didn’t get any get real traction because I didn’t give people a good reason to be engaged in my group.

4. Send out info about affiliate products without first asking my audience what they were interested in.

5. I didn’t engage my audience enough – with my group of 500+ would get one or two comments if I was lucky when I posted something on the wall

Twitter Mistakes

6. Went down the wall of my favorite Guru and added everyone following them.

7. Set up a DM that was something like the following – “Thanks for following me, I have tons of free information at Online4Offline.com” – I received a couple of hundred newsletter sign ups from a thousand or so friend requests. Before someone reads that and thinks it’s a good idea that was a year ago before everyone and their dog was doing spammy DMs.

8. Signed up for a friendadder service that FLOODED my DM box with spam. I left that quickly and stopped auto-following everyone back.

Digg and other social bookmarking site mistakes

9. Bookmarked my own sites across multiple accounts. Occasionally I would slip in another link or two.

10. Digg banned three of my accounts including my main which I wasn’t using for the spammy stuff. This happened when using strategies and software recommended by a well known Digg guru.
Since finding Simon Ford and Social Traffic I’ve learned to focus on creating and sharing good content that other people will read, share and comment on. Tell me some of the things you were told to do when you got started with social media:

In Seth Godin’s post today, How Big is Your World, he discusses how much our world is shrinking and introduces us to Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund and her book the Blue Sweater.

He raises good questions for all of us to ask ourselves, How much are we involved in the world? Are we actively doing something to help or are simply standing by, getting excited about the “issue of the day” and going on with our lives? We all need to take time out of our busy days and really stop and ask ourselves what we can do today to make the world a better place.

Jacqueline (one of my favorite names BTW) has experienced poverty in Africa and wrote what sounds like an amazing book about her experiences as a naive banker entering Africa and started the Acumen fund to build businesses to help fight poverty.

I believe that the grassroots, entrepreneurial approach is the only approach that works long-term to both stabilize and enrich a nation. Providing these entrepreneurs with access to training and capital will help us get past the corruption of their governments and the politics of the NGOs. I applaud the Acumen fund for their efforts.

To do my part for our shrinking world I’ve joined up with a group of social marketers, Social Traffic in a Grass Roots effort to enhance social awareness and promote Earth Day Birthday events. Our goals are to raise awareness about our environment, and use social marketing to enhance a good cause. We all need to give back with the skills that we have.

Doug
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