Social Media Marketing Habits You Need to Stop

Lack of etiquette in social media marketing could send all your efforts to the drains. Social media has managed to earn itself a name in marketing over the years. But it is more than just keeping track of your sharedcount.

Some practices could end up chasing away your followers, and you will only be left with little of your long-term efforts. You probably come across hundreds of articles covering best practices of social media marketing. However, there are practices that you should know of, that you are supposed to ward off.

You need to take some time off posting content and evaluate your social media habits and mark them against the following.

1. Narcissism

Yes, there exists conversational narcissism on social media. You could be guilty for it, even if it is once. It is a habit whereby, you as a business, tend always to bring the conversion back to being about you.

Why is it harmful to your marketing? The primary reason is that it interferes with engagement. If you are doing too much brand promotion, you end up not listening to your audience. You should not make everything about you. Instead, your audience should be the priority.

To break this weird habit, you could focus a bit more on asking your audience questions, liking their comments and participating in their remarks to mention a few.

2. Spamming

This one is punishable by death: well, not literally! But it could lead to the end of your social media marketing campaigns. Are you overusing hashtags? That is spamming. There is a lot that you may be doing on your page and may not realize it is spamming.

You might be tempted to create fake reviews, which is uncalled for. The main agenda of having reviews is getting genuine feedback from your audience to assist your brand to become better. This kind of spamming is not beneficial to you or your customers, and it should stop.

Other forms of spamming are serial posting, recycling content, click-baiting, hacking social media accounts and creating fake accounts.

3. Feeding the trolls

Whatever you do, do not respond to trolls on the internet. They aim to provoke an adverse reaction from you, and if you fall bait, you could end up making your brand look bad. Especially, with the slogan being carried around about internet speak.

Let the trolls speak, and if you have to react, do it in a way that shows that you acknowledge their concerns. Otherwise, being overly defensive and aggressive could backfire on you.

4. Auto-posting from one social media platform to the other

One cannot fail to admit that social media marketing could be time-consuming and tedious. However, that should not be reason enough for you to auto-post the same content you have on Facebook to Instagram or Twitter.

Why? Remember that the platforms host different types of audiences. And, for you to be able to engage them better, you have to post tailor-made content. The platforms also have different formats of publishing content, if you auto post, you could end up giving your audience content that is half-baked and missing some text or even images.

5. Setting your social media accounts to ‘private.’

Why would you need to set your Instagram account to ‘private’ anyway? Remember that you are trying to get your audience view your page to see what your brand is all about. Blocking non-followers from seeing your content will not help you win them over (as this is mostly the misconception about private accounts). A private account will do your brand more harm than good.

Not only will it limit you from reaching out to your audience, but it also makes your credibility questionable. Someone not following you does not mean that they are not interested in your offering. In fact, you might be getting more conversions from people who do not follow you. You should get rid of this habit. Otherwise, people will not be able to find you.

Doing away with these five habits will make your marketing efforts more effective, and you will be more likely to get an affirmative response from your audience.