Terrible Social Media Advice You Should Ignore

| Social media

Terrible Social Media Advice You Should Ignore

 

There are lots of people out there calling themselves “social media experts” dishing out advice, with a lot of it being misguided or based on limited experience. So with all this bad advice floating around the web how do you distinguish the good from the bad?

Here are 7 common but terrible social media advice you should ignore:

1) You need to be on every single social network

Don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to maintain a presence on every single social site. You should research and learn where your audience is so you can figure out where you should focus your efforts. If your audience isn’t there, don’t waste your time.

Feel free to experiment with new social networks that pop up but be ready to let them go if they aren’t working for you.

Not sure where to start? Focus on Facebook and Twitter as they are pretty safe options. Both have huge audiences in the UK that span many demographics and industries.

2) Social media is the new SEO

In terms of function and strategy, social media doesn’t replace SEO. SEO and social media actually work better when they are together but neither can replace each other.

For example, social media posts now show up in the search results so we know social media engagement influences search rankings and SEO can drive more people to your social profile and posts.

Social media is an additional channel, not something that should replace existing efforts like SEO. Billions of searches are conducted every single day, and you don’t want to miss out on that traffic.

3) You should automate all of your updates

Social media can be quite time consuming so many may suggest the solution is automated updates. These may be very appealing as they could save you a heap of time but social media is about people talking to people and users of these sites can usually see through automated updates. It may be ok to automate some posts like your latest blog articles but you still need to support that with real conversation and interaction.

4) Auto-publish your posts to all social networks at once

Again another great time saver but it is also a terrible practice. Not only does this look automated but you should also consider that different social media sites favour different types and frequencies of content. For example, images work well on Facebook. And it is acceptable for you to post much more frequently on Twitter than Facebook. Auto-publishing across many social sites can end up looking very spammy.

5) Sending auto DM to all your new followers

This used to be very popular, with companies automatically sending a short message thanking the user for following them, telling them to visit their site, etc but these types of messages are incredibly impersonal and are perceived as spam by most.

6) Your audience aren’t using social media, so you don’t need it

Of course your audience will be using social media. 69% of adults in the UK use at least one social site. The odds are that a fair amount of your audience is using these social networks regular, so don’t miss out.

7) You should only publish messages about your business

A lot of estate agents use social media to just talk about themselves, posting all their properties, talking about how many sales they’ve done, their upcoming events, etc. Social media isn’t about you; your followers want to hear about their problems, challenges and interests so that’s what you should be posting about.

You need to give people a reason to follow you and engage. Talking about the property market in your local area is likely to interest more people than you posting a 2 bedroom property for sale. 

Luke Stanley