I wrote yesterday on how failure is a good thing. So I thought I would share with you some of the mistakes I’ve made with social media. Hopefully this list will make you smile and let you know you’re not the only one who makes mistakes. Enjoy.
I sent out a misspelled tweet about our church’s live streaming. Recently our church’s live stream went down. I quickly sent out a tweet to let everyone know we were working on a solution, however I misspelled one small word on the tweet. Here’s what I sent out:
We’re experiencing technical difficulties and our love streaming is down. Should be back up shortly.
Obviously, I meant to say live streaming and not love streaming. I pulled it down before anyone noticed.
I forgot to proof a blog post that was picked up by The Gospel Coalition. There’s nothing like the rush of seeing your Google analytic numbers go up. Especially when it’s from a prominent site like The Gospel Coalition. However, the post that was picked up wasn’t supposed to be live yet, because it was still a rough draft. Let’s just say there was a lot errors in it that would make an english teacher blush.
I tweeted out a picture of my pastor’s lower posterior. A few months ago our pastor was speaking to our leadership. I wanted to capture the moment and I took a photo of him speaking on stage. I then tweeted out the photo and moved on. What I didn’t realize was that I took the photo vertically (which I rarely do) and that Twitter cropped the photo in the timeline view. Twitter managed to crop out everything except my pastor’s lower posterior. Thanks Twitter.
I got in argument over SEO on Twitter. Arguments on social media are ridiculous. I participated in one and won’t do it again.
I bought Twitter followers as an experiment. Amy Haywood and I decided to conduct an experiment and see what would happen when you bought Twitter followers. So we went to Fiverr and paid someone five bucks for 20,000 followers. Did we get the followers? Yes. Did they stick around? Nope. They were robots and we lost them about two days after we bought them.
I followed too many people on Twitter and then I decided to unfollow them and they got angry. I ran another experiment on Twitter and tried to see how many people I could gain if I followed everyone on Twitter who followed me. I also tried to follow as many people who had a high chance of following me back. Did it work? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that I gained a lot of followers. No, in the sense that it added nothing for me in terms of building community. I also learned that some people really take unfollowing on Twitter personally.
I used the same template too many times on a Facebook promo. Recently we were trying to promote our small groups event. We carefully planned our Facebook promotional photos with quotes and queued them up. What we didn’t think through was that when you’re running an advertisement on Facebook is that it’s very important to vary the imagery you’re using. If you use the same look too many times, people will begin to ignore the promotion.
I tweeted out a sarcastic comment to my executive pastor from our church account. My executive pastor once tweeted that we should take the time to thank our ministers for all the hard work they do. Since I’m married to one of the student ministers, I thought it would be funny to tweet “I thanked one this morning”, obviously referring to my wife (and no I didn’t mean that tweet in an inappropriate way). It seemed funny to me at the time, but I sent it out on the wrong account. The church’s account. I pulled it within ten seconds of it being posted, but it was embarrassing nonetheless.
I accidentally set my profile pic as the church’s profile pic on Facebook. Facebook’s photo management system is an embarrassment and I found out the hard way when it picked the wrong photo for our church’s profile pic. Awkward.
I caught a co-workers computer on fire. Okay, this happened while I was at LifeWay, but I can still smell the burnt hard drive of Aaron Linne’s computer.
I accidentally caught an amusement park restaurant on fire while working for a charity. This actually happened in college. Long story. Let’s just say there’s a theme park in America where security has a photo of me on file.
I hope this list made you laugh and encouraged to go out and try. Failure’s not that bad and it can be a bit amusing.