5 social media bad practices to avoid

There is no doubt that social media marketing can be a boost to your business, bringing in a greater share of traffic, generating leads and increasing conversions.

However, at GO Creative we see many instances of social media bad practices. By this we mean the use of tactics in social media campaigns that can be at best ineffective and at worst damaging to your brand.

Here are 5 social media bad practices that you need to avoid in your campaigns:

1. Link Baiting – This means creating provocative or compelling headlines (or short Tweets) to simply pull in traffic and increase Likes. This type of behaviour is easily spotted because the content does not live up to the headline and is seen as deceptive behaviour. If you persist in deceiving your audience you will soon lose them, so make sure that your content fulfils the advertised headline or Tweet.
2. Spamming your audience – Sending your audience multiple posts each day or even daily can in some cases be seen as spamming. This can result in your customers simply deleting your posts or even unsubscribing. There needs to be a happy medium between authentic contact and spamming – the line is fairly grey, so just be careful here.
3. Not engaging your audience – Along with spamming people comes persistent advertising. Social media networking is really about engaging a wider audience, contributing to topical discussions and sharing helpful and interesting content. It is not a tool to exploit for advertising. People will notice and stop following you or unsubscribe. So be judicious in the amount of advertising you do across your social media channels.
4. Ignoring or deleting negative comments – A great way to engage your audience is to address negative comments in the open. This will increase audience engagement, build trust and foster a reputation of fairness, understanding and a willingness to acknowledge faults and to put things right. The absolute worst you can do is delete negative comments as this will show that you don’t care about others and imply that you are only using social media for advertising purposes.
5. Not having a strategy – Going in blind and hoping for the best may well result in multiple fails. You can waste your time and annoy your audience very quickly on social media, so make sure you have a realistic strategy in place before jumping into the fray.

If you want help creating an effective social media campaign for your business, call GO Creative on 07 3333 2932 or complete our enquiry form.