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Some years back when I was still working at University as a research and teaching assistant, two of my professors were arguing what kind of student employees they were looking for. One was saying, he was out for the genius students. The other said: „Well if you are looking for student tutors you should rather be looking at a more normal kind of people. The ones who have faced the same difficulties as their pupils face now and, therefore, can well explain to their pupils and teach them to overcome their problems.“

(On a side note: I am a mathematician, so the subjects our students had to learn were not easy for just anybody to understand. Most students of mathematics at one point or other have to face some things they do not understand by simply reading about it.)

And I think the second professor was dead right. People tend to have difficulties in really explaining things they have never had to figure out on their own. If you do not understand how anyone can have any difficulty in understanding something how can you figure out an explanation they will understand? If you never had any trouble with anything, how can you tell others how to fix the trouble they are having?

In Social Media marketing, there are many consultants, bloggers, coaches or social media managers, who have read a lot about social media marketing. They certainly know the marketing theory. And hopefully, a high percentage of them can apply their knowledge to the standard cases.

But what happens if they have to face a situation where what they learned in the theory does not apply or for some not so apparent reason does not work as they learned? Will they have the experience and the necessary equipment in the form of ideas, innovative thinking and test methods to puzzle together a way out of the mess?

There is a huge difference between marketing theory and application

It all starts with the gap between ideal theoretical cases and the actual situations you have to work with. Social Media marketing is not like math where there is only black and white and right and wrong. No two cases are exactly the same and what looked easy in theory may produce nothing but crap in reality.

When we were still building our publishing platform exploreB2B and were looking to scale growth, one option we tried was Google advertising. We worked together with Google on it. In return for us being willing to spend a considerable amount of money on advertising, Google provided us with an expert on Google advertising to get it all on the right track.

And it utterly and completely failed.

We did all we could to save the case: We had our programmers set up landing pages for each keyword, we set up masses of different ad campaigns for various keywords and messages.

Nothing worked. Most likely if we had had more money and more time to spend on trying things out, we may have been able to figure out a way to use Google Adwords for building our platform. We did not have this luxury and turned to other methods instead, which gave us faster results.

Have you read about growing a Twitter account?

I have built over 25 topics oriented Twitter accounts. I know that no two topics act the same way on Twitter.

Of course, the basics of growing a Twitter account are the same each time.

You always have to provide value for exactly your target audience. You should join conversations and interact with other accounts. You can follow people to make them get aware of you and hopefully follow you back.

Sounds easy in theory, doesn’ it? But the truth is, there is much more to actually and successfully grow a Twitter account. How do you find your niche and your target audience? It’s slightly different for each niche. How do people react to your efforts? It even makes an enormous difference to do something on Twitter in Germany or the US.

I could write a story about building these 25 different accounts and all the differences between the topics – and someone reading it would still not have my experience and knowledge. Not because my reader is not as intelligent or imaginative as I am.

But simply because he has not done it. He has not seen one account grow by 50 new followers a day and another by 5 while both were following the same routine. He did not have to find a way of making the slow account grow faster. He has not had to target for each and every niche of 25 different accounts and topics.

In marketing theory, everything sounds easy

A good friend once told me: “When everything goes as planned it is easy to succeed. Real quality shows in how people cope with problems”.

In theory, you never have to face a problem. In theory, it always sounds easy and straight forward. And the best people to help with a problem are not the ones who know the theory most thoroughly but never faced any problem themselves.

It is the people who have faced and solved some problems on their own. Because they know how to go about finding a solution.

There is a lot you can learn from failures – even by those of others

When browsing social media marketing blogs, there are two groups of posts you can learn from. One group of posts shows you the best practice. That is the theory you can (and should) learn. But in the end in some cases, they will simply not be enough (just reading in theory that I need excellent pictures to go with my blog post does not make me a designer and my pictures will still look ugly if it was not for Canva).

The second group of posts I often find much more attractive: Those are the posts about failures and how the author learned from the failure and figured out a way out of his dilemma.

These posts are great. They teach you how to wriggle your way out of a tight spot before your marketing goes totally to hell.

What can you learn from it?

An expert marketer was not made from books. Most social media marketers have done mistakes and faced situations where a carefully planned marketing strategy was not at all going as planned. Actually, this is more common than you would think. And most of the time that is not because these marketers did not know their theory. Marketers are not operating in a clinical space where each and every aspect of the initial situation can be fully considered. And most of the time the way to marketing success is trying a strategy, measuring, adjusting and optimizing – until it all fits.

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