When a social media campaign fails, it can be embarrassing. An unfortunately timed social post or off-brand attempt at following a trend can even tarnish your brand’s online reputation. But we aren’t here to talk about big brands and their tone-deaf tweets, this is about carefully planned out social media campaigns that made no impact, whether positive or negative. Was it the algorithm? Not enough hashtags? Too many hashtags? There can be a few reasons why your campaign failed. Let’s take a look at some common mistakes and how you can avoid repeating them.

This might be the worst. You take the time to plan out social posts, create some nice graphics, maybe do some photography, and choose the exact right time when scheduling, and then – nothing. Maybe a few likes from your own employees (cheers, guys!), but that’s it. Your big campaign landed with a whisper rather than a bang. But what can you do about this?

If you are relying on organic social media reach, it can take some time to build up your follower count and get your posts into more people’s feeds. If you are starting from scratch, you won’t see much engagement to begin with. But persevere, keep testing different messaging and strategies, and you will see those numbers go up.

Social media is a two-way street – you can’t just throw a load of posts online and not spend any time using the platform and interacting with other accounts. If someone comments on your posts, take the time to reply. Engage with other similar content and start conversations online with others. It takes a little time, but it’s worth allocating just a few minutes a day for social media engagement.

People aren’t going to respond well to posts that just share products and push sales. What real-life problems are you solving with your products and services, and why should people come to you instead of a competitor? Offer authenticity and vary your social posts between being harder and more salesy and softer, storytelling kind of posts. Instagram and TikTok users are experts at spotting overly curated content and ignoring it – for these platforms, especially, more raw, authentic content performs best. Avoid overly polished videos and share behind-the-scenes videos in the form of stories and reels, and share more user-generated content.

At first, the campaign is looking great – people are liking, sharing and commenting on your social posts. But when you look at orders, the campaign didn’t lead to any conversions and seems to have no impact at all. What went wrong?

So many brands spend time and money on social media and advertising campaigns, and yet, every button click just brings visitors to the front page of their website. If people are clicking through to the website, they are interested, but you have just dropped them off at the front door with zero guidance on continuing the customer journey, making them more likely to give up and go somewhere else. Creating a tailored landing page that is relevant to the post that they clicked on will keep people interested and more likely to follow through and take the action you desire, whether that be buying a product, joining a mailing list, or something else.

Not everyone on social media will be interested in your brand. In fact, a lot of them really won’t be. The key is to find those that are and reach them. Take time to research your target audience, find out what social media platforms they use, their demographics, needs, behaviours and more. Creating customer personas can help a lot with this.

It’s pretty hard to decide if a campaign was a success or not if you don’t set clear, measurable goals right from the start. Were you hoping for more followers, more website traffic, increased brand awareness, lead generation, or something else? Without a goal, even a campaign that performs ‘well’ in terms of likes or views may offer no tangible business value. Whatever happens with your social media campaign, not being able to track and measure success is setting yourself up for failure. 

Setting SMART goals is a good way to measure success, that is, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, goals like “Increase website traffic from Instagram by 25% over the next four weeks” or “Generate 50 new email sign-ups from Facebook ads in one month” give you something tangible to work towards. With clear goals in place, your social media efforts will feel much more purposeful, and you’ll have real data to back up your successes.

UTM codes are a good way to track the efficacy of your social media posts. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module (weird name, we know). It’s a bit of extra text added to the end of a URL that helps tools like Google Analytics understand exactly where your web traffic is coming from, e.g. which platform, the campaign name, whether it was a paid ad or organic post, and more. They can help you to see which campaigns and which specific posts are converting, and also allow for comparison across platforms. Google’s free Campaign URL Builder is a good place to start.

Many brands fall into the trap of relying on surface-level indicators, such as likes or follower counts, to determine success. While those can be encouraging, they rarely tell the full story. You might have a post that gets 100 likes but results in zero clicks, or one that gets only a few likes but brings in a dozen new leads. Start by using the built-in analytics tools on each platform, e.g. Instagram Insights, Meta Business Suite, and LinkedIn Analytics. You can see stats like reach (how many people saw the post), engagement and click-through rates, shares, saves and more. Once you start spotting these trends, you can refine your strategy instead of just repeating it. The best-performing social campaigns aren’t one-off strokes of luck, they’re the result of ongoing testing, tweaking, and learning from what the data is telling you.

If you are still not sure about how you can improve your social media campaigns, or don’t have the time to take the steps above, let us help – get in touch with the team here at Identity Agency or drop us an email at hello@identityagency.co.uk.