4 simple reasons why you aren’t making a killing with Social Media

Sharing links on Twitter, driving traffic from Facebook and promoting businesses using Foursqaure are all the rage these days. These seem to be working well for the most part. But we still see hordes of complaints and rants from beginners, all saying that social media simply isn’t working for them. If you are among them, we list four very simple, and seemingly obvious, reasons why marketing via social media isn’t working for you.

You are a perfectionist

This works great when you are heading a multi-million dollar company, or trying to land a date with the cute girl in your class. But with the intense competition online, being a perfectionist is only going to work against you.

Perfectionists think, “I will create a Twitter account today and won’t post any link till I win X number of followers.” They either never reach their target number or end up ambitiously stretching the number further. By the time they post their first link and drive their first visitor they will have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of potential earned dollars.

You miss the trees for the woods

You are literally turning the famous aphorism on its head and missing out smaller details for the bigger picture. For you, social media is synonymous and inseparable from Twitter and Facebook. You forget that these are just two trees in the woods, albeit two very popular ones. The competition on these sites is so intense that beginners find it tough to find a foothold quickly.

So while you try to gain a good following on these sites, look out for smaller sites, especially ones which are country-specific like ibibo.com. These will often be more effective.

You spend too much time on ‘research’

This is a trait similar to that of a perfectionist, with the minor difference that perfections, provided they don’t run out of patience, still manage to be pretty successful over a longer term. This category of marketers, though, has plenty of patience. So much so that they are ready to spend months ‘learning’ about marketing, dreaming of one fine day when they will be able to wake up, go online and drive thousands of sales using the methods they learned over the past months. Most of them are just pure lazy and keep procrastinating work. Others feel they still have some education left! Either ways, by the time they do manage to get down to work, if ever, the methods they learned have become obsolete.

You are stuck in the box

Almost every person who successfully manages to implement a basic method that makes them a few dollars ends up making an e-book and selling it to other beginners. This category of people includes people who follow the methods listed in the books to a T, refusing to innovate on their own. With thousands of marketers, if we can call them that, using the same methods on the same sites, the profits get distribute. It’s simple arithmetic. If you want more than your share of profits, you have to learn to innovate and come up with newer methods on your own.

Here’s a final tip: Don’t stop pursuing a method just because it didn’t work in the first week. Most strategies require more than a month to show results. And once you achieve the desired results, don’t package them in an e-book and sell the method.