How your social media strategy hurts more than it helps

As a professor, I often present my students with a real product from a make-believe company and ask them to develop a business strategy and a marketing plan for it. They then have five minutes to present their plan to the class.

Often, in the first iteration of their plan, they confidently share that they will “use social media to do their marketing.” That’s it. That’s the entirety of their marketing plan. They quickly realize that this simplistic recommendation is the quickest way to an F.

Flooding social media with information about your product is not good marketing, though it is an all-too-common approach that companies take. Many business leaders think that if they post something about their product on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, every single day, eventually they’ll gain traction. Like my students, that becomes the core and extent of their marketing plan.

Social media platforms are nothing more than channels you can use to get your message out. Figuring out which channels you’re going to use in your marketing only answers about 5% of the questions you need to ask. Without the right positioning and messaging, it might be a complete waste of time and money—and actually do more harm than good.

It’s not a silver bullet