It’s the end of the year when many businesses take a deep breath, reflect on success and shortfalls from the current year, and begin planning for 2012. Before you jump into your social media and business plans, consider these all-too-common pitfalls. These are mistakes I’ve made myself over the years or mistakes I’ve seen other organizations make. Please include your own “lessons learned” or share your thoughts in the comments section. Without further introduction, here are my eight pitfalls:

1. You think about the social platform before the strategy – If you’ve set up a Facebook page or a LinkedIn group but haven’t really thought about why your company should be there (outside the fact that these sites are popular), then you need to take a step back. There’s no other part of your business where you’d invest without first understanding why or what you’re doing. You wouldn’t buy ad words without research nor would you redesign your website without usability feedback, so why would you create a Facebook account if you don’t even know whether your target audience is there? Like every other business decision, think about your audience and your goals before choosing the tactics to get you there. Social sites are no exception.

2. You haven’t explored “social” outside of “media” – If you’re thinking about social from only a PR or marketing perspective, then you’re missing out. You can use social technologies to achieve more for your business, outside of awareness and brand management. Think R&D, market research, sales, technical support, and so on. At National Instruments, we use our online community to ask customers for new product and feature ideas and for help prioritizing the best ones for R&D. We then implement those ideas directly into the product. Our online listening tools help us not only monitor across the social web for technical support questions, but we also use these tools to find stories of customers using our products and surface the best ones on NI blogs like Sweet Apps.

3. You forget to track – It’s easy, in fact, it’s ridiculously easy to set up a social profile and begin communicating. But just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s OK to forget to track. In the simplest sense, make sure you use bit.lys or other URL shorteners to track how many clicks you’re driving from social media sites back to your website. Take a look to see which types of content people click on, share, and comment on, and provide more of that stuff. If you share content and get inquiries back, consider these leads or chances to take the conversation further. Keep track of these people and conversations. Think about the overall sentiment of your brand online – is it mostly positive or negative? What are people saying? Use this insight to bring valuable information into your business, straight from the customer’s mouth.

4. You don’t think about social networks as an extension of your own website – Before jumping off into the world of social media sites, take a close look at your already existing website. If you’d be embarrassed to drive traffic back to your site or if your visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for, you may have more work to do before you send people there. Your “off domain” social media sites can’t live in a vacuum. Your website and your social media sites should constantly play off one another and loop people between experiences. Think: What can people do only on my website, what can people do only on Facebook for example, and how can I connect the two?

5. You’re doing all the chirping – If you’ve found yourself doing all the talking, it’s time to reevaluate. There’s a little rule of thumb I heard once at a conference (I believe it can be attributed to Angela Maiers), and it’s stuck with me ever since. It’s the “70-20-10” rule for content sharing. 70% of the time, share valuable information and resources – things that will help people. 20% of the time, engage people in conversation. Ask questions, reply back, converse with people. 10% of the time, chit-chat or “chirp” about how awesome you are. Usually companies flip the 70% and the 10%.

6. You never say thank you – Your first fan is as important as your 10,000th. This is a lesson we learned quickly at National Instruments. When we noticed our LabVIEW Facebook account was at 9,980 fans one morning, we knew we were going to hit the big 10K that day. Seeing as this was a huge milestone for us, we decided to have some fun and posted that our 10,000th fan would get a small token of our appreciation. Shortly after, some of our original fans were asking why they hadn’t been thanked or recognized for being so involved over the years. They were right. Sometimes you focus on where you’re going too much and forget to thank those who’ve been in it with you all along.

7. You use giveaways to expand your follower base – Building off Pitfall No. 6, you can’t expect to sustain a loyal following solely based off of giveaways. You’ll attract the wrong people if you do this. Great content is the No. 1 thing that keeps people coming back for more. You HAVE TO give people a reason to visit you on social networks, so ask yourself, “What’s in it for them?”. Believe it or not, people don’t want just your trinkets. They want to be rewarded by being thanked for their contributions or for getting their ideas heard by your company and their peers.

8. You realize there’s no education throughout your business – When your boss says, “I don’t understand Twitter,” take this as an opportunity to educate him or her instead of saying, “That’s why you hired me.” Because honestly, there’s no job security in you being the only one who understands social business. Without taking the time to update your stakeholders and get internal advocates, you won’t get the buy in and momentum you need to grow your program. So, if you haven’t done an internal road show yet, make it first on your to-do list for 2012.

Bio
Andria Elliott is the Corporate Content Manager at National Instruments (NI) and plays in integral role in the company’s social business program, which she helped kick start in 2008. Since then, the program at NI has grown tremendously and received recognition by organizations like Forrester and the Marketing Leadership Council. Along with global counterparts across the business, Andria connects like-minded engineers on social platforms, helps ensure customer success, obtains product feedback, and grows awareness of the NI brands.