It’s not often that brands are willing to share the mistakes that occurred during their social media campaigns, even though those are often the most valuable insights.

Therefore it was very refreshing to hear Radio France’s head of digital marketing Virginie Cleve talk through a few of the things that didn’t go to plan when the business embarked on a new social strategy.

Cleve was speaking at Socialbakers’ Engage NYC event today where she revealed that the public broadcaster, which has more than 5m daily listeners and attracts 3.5m unique visitors per month to its website, redesigned its digital marketing strategy in 2011 with a new focus on editorial.

Radio France didn’t have a large email database that it could use to promote the content, so instead decided to use social channels focusing primarily on Facebook.