Social media mistakes are unintentional blunders that are typically made by very well intentioned people. Even with all the free information on the internet, a large number of people jump into social media without knowing the basic rules of engagement.
In some cases, these mistakes are made by people who claim to be social media experts. For those of us who have who live and breath social media every day, it is painful to watch and even more painful to see unsuspecting companies pay for such services.
Do you have an employee, intern, outside social media firm or freelancer executing your social media marketing efforts? If you do, you should take a moment to read through this list of common social media blunders. Then take a few more minutes to review your active social media accounts to see if you have any of these mistakes occurring with your name or brand.
Let’s Look at Some Very Common Social Media Mistakes and Blunders
- You Friday Follow (#FF) yourself
- You like your own posts or status updates on Facebook
- Customers or prospects have to friend your company to engage (this means you set up a personal profile for your company and it should be an actual page)
- Your profile image is a ghost or a cartoon character
- You tweet only your own stuff, because you want to be genuine
- You’ve blocked your competition on Twitter
- You send sales pitches through Twitter DMs, LinkedIn email, and Facebook messages
- Your profile is bare intentionally, because you don’t want to give away to much information to the competitor
- You have Twitter auto post to Facebook or vice versa
- Your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn status has “test” in it or HTML errors
- You offer expert “tips” that were pulled from a blog post you wrote five years ago
- You tweet about an appearance at a major event or show and you forget the event’s hashtag or to even mention the event producer
- You view social media as a “time suck” and you refuse to participate
- You tell people to like your Facebooke page, but forget to include the link
- Your website lacks links to your accounts or their smashed in on the footer
If you participate in three or more of the above social media tactics, you’re not following social media best practices. In fact, you’re probably doing more damage to your company name and brand than you realize.
Think I’m Being Harsh?
All of the examples are classic situations I see day after day with prospects and clients. It is simply because social media is still fairly new to many and people have not taken the time to dig into it and learn best practices.
Take the time to dig in. Social media is an integral part of online marketing, SEO, and overall branding.
Yeah right. Many marketers do these mistakes. One year ago I did also. Great post thanks for share.
I made these mistakes when I was a newbie, too. When I see someone else make them, I think, ‘You go get ’em, kid!’
I’m know as a bit of an internet stalker. When I meet someone knew in person (professionally) I immediately go look them up. If I’m introduced to someone virtually, I look them up before I even respond to the introduction.
This stalking has served me well in social media, because the more you stalk at the beginning the more you learn and the less blatant mistakes you make.
That being said, I still tend to learn “something” all the time. But this is why I love internet marketing as much as I do. It moves so fast there is always something to learn and absorb.
Great reminder to every webmasters Becca! Sometimes we overlook some important stuff, and we only see social media in a one sided coin. One wrong move in social media site could ruin a lot of reputation to the site that you are working with. That is why before you post, like, tweet, advertise, promote, or advertise using Social media, you really, really, need to get yourself down to the basics!
Love this post you have Becca! An eye opener to every web masters and internet marketers that utilizes social media for search visibility. More power and see you for in your future post! =)
The BASICS. Oh so important.
We have so many design clients that want everything fancy and they worry about things like optimizing Facebook images for all sort of sizes, when really they just need to slow down and learn about the basics.