Social media is here to stay and chances are you will get a lot more followers in the future. It’s in your interest to stay to relevant. People follow others because there is something useful or valuable they can learn from them. It’s imperative that you continue to deliver that great content to continue to win the trust of your followers. Anything short of that will put your reputation in jeopardy.
Sometimes your audience are not impressed with what you share on your social profiles. They can complain but they can’t stop you from sharing everything you want to put out there. You may be attracting a few likes and retweets so you think you it’s okay. But guess what, they have the right to unlike and unfollow you. You don’t want that. It’s your job to make sure your updates are vuluable, useful, informative and worth sharing.
These are a few things you may be doing wrong on social media as shared by a few marketing professionals you could trust.
1. Your Twitter Feed Is Professionally Boring
Ed Zitron (Inc. Magazine)
Marketing 101 dictates that you use Twitter to promote your specific industry or company, right? The answer is yes, but not always. If your entire Twitter feed becomes a stream of on-brand blather all the time, you will become a deeply boring and uninteresting human being to the world at large. Yes, you will get a drab industry-related following if you work hard enough at it, but no one will related to you. Unless you’re providing actual data or real insight (no, that doesn’t mean “expertise.”)
People read and follow people on Twitter because they have something interesting (or funny) to say or share. If you are only able to talk about your industry, you may as well be an RSS feed.
2. Only talking about your products and services.
Kim Lachance Shandrow (Entrepreneur Magazine)
By now, this one should be a no-brainer. Don’t be that guy at the party who only talks about himself. Posting status updates, tweets and pins that narcissistically revolve around your brand only is tantamount to social-media suicide. You’ll quickly come off as too corporate, self-serving and disconnected from your customers and their needs. An exodus of followers is sure to, well, follow.
Small-business expert Steven D. Strauss, author of The Small Business Bible (Wiley, 2012) suggests following the 80-20 rule to establish a meaningful connection with customers via social media. That is to say that 80 percent of the content you post should address your customers’ problems and only 20 percent should be about your company and what you do.
3. Hashtag Overload
Hashtags are a brilliant way of curating information, providing context and categorising content to reach a specific audience. However, people tend to abuse this by cramming as many hashtags as possible into a single tweet or use it as a secondary voice, usually to denote sarcasm (the latter is arguably worse although your opinion may differ).
Depending on the medium, two to four hashtags are an acceptable amount (e.g.: two for Twitter and more for the likes of Instagram where an image would appeal to a wider demographic) for people to know who the tweet is aimed towards, and provide context.
4. The announcer of literally everything
Sometimes we get people posting these nothing updates:
“Hi, all. I am now at the barber.”
“Wow, I just woke up from sleep!”
“I bought a pen! Cool, right?”
“Hey, friends, you know what? Lisa fell down and has a small bruise on her knee!”
If an event is exciting, or an insight new and interesting, then tell the world. However, if your “updates” are generally boring or banal, try not to overdo it.
5. Automated Direct Messages on Twitter
When someone follows you on Twitter, there isn’t an implicit agreement saying it’s okay to send them a direct message. Twitter isn’t an email list, it’s a conversation. It’s a conversation centered around the concept of giving before receiving. So, that automated DM requesting a LIKE on your Facebook page when you’ve done literally nothing valuable for that new follower is a bit greedy to say the least.
Sending an automated DM to every new person who follows you is bad Twitter etiquette and it’s plainly hypocritical when your Twitter bio brags about how your mantra for social media success is “engagement.”
There’s nothing genuinely engaging about an automated DM you send to every new follower. Don’t kid yourself: It’s beyond easy to spot them too — automated DMs read like an advertisement, have generic messages, and usually aren’t personalized. People catch on with ease. That’s no way to start a relationship with a new follower.
6. Asking For Shares Or Retweets
Honestly, there’s nothing more discouraging to see than people or pages posting an update or offer and then asking you to please share or retweet. Not only does it come across as incredibly needy, but it offers no engagement and ultimately does nothing for your cause. It’s the online equivalent of going up to a bunch of strangers, screaming “be my friend!” and expecting them to enthusiastically oblige.
If you do post something like that, the only people that will oblige will be your closest friends. Everyone else will ignore it and will get annoyed by the begging and unfollow or hide your updates. Even if people did share it in their droves, it’s not because they believe in the cause or think it’s a great offer, just because someone begged for it.