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7 deadly social media sins
Social media is fast becoming one of the most powerful weapons in any marketing person’s armoury. Used correctly social media offers numerous benefits including the ability to target customers more effectively, expand your audience, share content faster and increase website search ranking. But beware, a poorly managed social media account can actually do your business more harm than good. Here are the seven social media sins and how you should avoid them:
1. Having an inactive account
There’s no point setting up a Twitter or Facebook business account if you’re not going to use it. If a customer visits your page and see’s you haven’t put up a new post in two months what are they going to think? It makes you look lazy and that you don’t care about your brand. If you’re worried you’re going to fall into this trap, appoint a member of staff or an external agency and make them fully responsible for managing your social account(s). If that’s not possible, social media isn’t for your business.
2. Hashtag Spamming
Hashtags are used to organise conversations around a specific topic and they are an excellent way of engaging with the wider Twitter community. Overuse of hashtags however can make you look desperate to pick up followers and that you don’t understand what you’re doing. Make sure you use hashtags sparingly and only for conversations where you can add real opinion or value. Remember hashtags should be used to tag content not #every #single #word #in #a #sentence – #itsjustwrong
3. Social SEO suicide
Being a social media spammer not only hurts your reputation, it can also damage your SEO efforts. Search engine algorithms are now punishing duplicate content more than ever and if you consistently post the same link or content over and over again it will start to devalue your page ranking.
4. Zero relevance
You need to make sure your tweets are relevant to your audience. However tempting it may be to tweet photos of your dinner or your pet save it for your personal account, not the corporate one. When people follow you they do so for a reason – to engage with relevant interesting content. Start positing random irrelevant content and you risk alienating your audience.
5. Blatant broadcasting
Social media is not a platform for you to broadcast corporate messages, it’s a space for conversations and interactivity. Think of Twitter like a virtual pub. You wouldn’t walk up to someone in real life and start talking at them without listening, you would engage in a two-way conversation – the same rules apply with Twitter.
6. Retweeting for tweet’s sake
Don’t just retweet the things that you are interested in – make sure all your retweets are of interest to your audience and have a strategic purpose. If you’re a manufacturing company, retweeting government statistics relating to manufacturing statistics for example will position you as an expert in your field.
7. Over-sharing
Think before you tweet. What makes you laugh at the pub after work on a Friday, may not be something you necessarily want to share with your followers. It only takes one dubious post to damage your brand and quickly lose followers.
So there you have it, seven social media sins and how you should avoid them. If you need help with your social media strategy contact Purplex. We manage the social media accounts for many companies – ranging from large multi-nationals to small regional firms – and we can devise a social strategy tailored to your business and goals.
This entry was posted in Digital Marketing
