How to Recover From a Failed Social Media Campaign

Chloe Humphreys July 2, 2024

A social media campaign has become crucial for businesses in today’s digital age, as it’s a very useful way to grow your brand. Around 5.07 billion of the world’s population (62.6%) are social media users, so having a good social media presence is great for strengthening your reputation.

Social media grants brands a powerful platform to cultivate their voice and connect directly with customers, which is something that used to be more of a challenge before the digital age. This power comes with responsibility as careless posts, misspellings or an insensitive hashtag choice can snowball into a failed social media campaign.

These missteps on social media can be devastatingly swift and can happen within the blink of an eye without an efficient campaign in place. Recovering from a failed social media campaign can be a huge challenge, as it can set back your business and force you to change your strategy.

With that being said, how do you recover from a failed social media campaign and how can you regrow your business after it? Here is everything you need to know about how your business should react to an unsuccessful social media campaign and how you can recover.

Defining your social media goals

Before we look at how to recover from a failed social media campaign, it’s important to understand what your goals of the campaign are. Most businesses want a strong social media campaign to grow their brand, promote a product or promote their services. No matter the core reason, there are specific goals that businesses tend to want from their social media campaign. 

These include:

• Greater brand awareness
• Increase website traffic
• Generate more customers
• Boost sales and revenue
• Improve engagement rates
• Strengthen community
• More SEO leads
• Better market research
• Target a niche audience

Defining clear, measurable and achievable goals should help you build a stronger strategy and avoid a failed social media campaign. You should also have goals if you are recovering from an unsuccessful campaign, as you can better manage progress, demonstrate learning and prevent future mishaps from happening.

Failed social media campaign recovery

Be honest

If your Twitter or Facebook advertising has failed due to a social media management issue, such as engagement neglect, it’s important to be honest with your shortcomings. One-way communication and ignoring negative feedback are two of the ways that a social media campaign can fail. Customers appreciate the fact that there’s a human behind the brand, so it’s very important to be transparent with any issues.

An example of a company that recovered from a social media blunder is American Red Cross. In 2011, a social media account manager forgot to log back into their personal account and tweeted out a rather embarrassing tweet about irresponsible alcohol consumption. The American Red Cross were quick to delete the tweet and were very honest about the blunder, even adding humour to the situation.

Being honest with yourself and your customers will help you understand what went wrong and how you can avoid it in the future. This can lead to more concise planning and help you ensure that you don’t have another failed social media campaign.

Keep your other campaigns strong

A failed social media campaign won’t be the end of the world if your other digital marketing campaigns remain strong. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and Pay-per-Click (PPC) are two of the main digital marketing campaigns that can help you increase your brand visibility and reach a wider audience. 

When you have a diverse marketing strategy in place, when one avenue is weak, having a strong presence on search engine results pages can help to continually drive traffic to the website.

There are three pillars of SEO; on-site, off-site and technical. A weak on-site SEO campaign could be the reason why your Google rankings drop, so you must keep this strong consistently, and especially if you have a failed social media campaign. On-site SEO involves creating new content and optimising existing content for your website so that it can appear higher on SERPs.

The main method of off-site SEO is link building, as it is done to improve the placement of articles within organic search results. Whereas, technical SEO’s main goal is to improve the elements of your website. A balance of on-site, off-site and technical SEO will help to provide consistency that isn’t always possible when you’re experiencing a failed social media campaign.

A strong PPC advertising campaign can also give you some relief from a failed social media campaign. With this type of advertising, you only pay when someone is genuinely interested and clicks on your ad. This targeted approach lets you reach potential customers actively searching for what you offer.

Maintain relationships

When something doesn’t go to plan in life, it’s normal to turn to those that you know for support. This is similar to businesses on social media, as seeking help from other business allies can be a good way to recover from a failed social media campaign. Maintaining those relationships is important to ensure that you don’t completely lose progress on the platforms.

Asking for feedback from other businesses that you are acquainted with can also be a good idea in helping you recover from an unsuccessful social media campaign. A true desire to learn from mistakes paves the way for future success.

Reach out to customers

A good way to recover from a failed social media campaign is by reaching out to existing customers and your target audience. Businesses that effectively reach out to their customers recultivate stronger relationships, rebuild brand loyalty and drive success in the future.

There are several outreach strategies that businesses can take advantage of to recover from a failed strategy, such as:

• Targeted communication: Segmenting your audience and tailoring your outreach accordingly will ensure that your message resonates with specific customer needs.
• Valuable content: Customers should be provided with informative content, industry insights and special offers that will add value to their lives.
• Interactive experiences: Methods such as surveys, polls and Q&As can be great communication tools that can make the customers feel as though their voice is heard.
• Multiple channels: Different customer preferences should always be taken into account no matter what type of business you have. Utilising multiple channels is a great way to approach this.

Rebuild reputation

When your business suffers from a failed social media campaign, it’s important not to dwell and instead focus on rebuilding your reputation. A strong recovery plan is the best way to do this, as it can help you understand what went wrong and how you can fix the issues. The main target should be to rebuild trust with customers.

Establishing clear goals is important when developing a recovery plan, as it’s a great way to measure how successful it is. You should aim to reach your goals by certain time frames to know that you are making good progress.

Documenting the events, creating a clear communication strategy and conducting a risk assessment are all impactful ways of helping you recover successfully. Hiring a digital marketing agency can help you with the process of recovering from a failed social media campaign and help create your recovery plan.

Final thoughts

Recovering from a failed social media campaign isn’t easy, as it can be a long process that requires a lot of hard work. If you have the right tools and plans in place, you should start to see positive steps towards regaining your brand reputation after a social media blunder.

If you have experienced an unsuccessful social media campaign and are having trouble recovering from it, then contact our team to discuss how we can help you. As well as high quality organic and paid social media services, we also provide social media retargeting to help keep your business in people’s minds and to regain their attention to assist with your recovery from a failed social media campaign.