We’ve all got one – that person in our social feed who is just plain doing it wrong. For me, it’s usually my friends’ parents. My favorite faux pas include posting someone’s name as a status when intending to search for them, sending shoutouts to your child even though said child isn’t on Facebook, and generally refusing to post anything that doesn’t have 5 emoticons attached to it. (Never change, Mrs. R!)
But this epidemic of Doing It Wrong is now so widespread that your “Friends” are no longer the biggest offenders. Businesses are unintentionally creating halfcocked, uninformed brands by misusing their social channels. It’s not that their behavior is offensive; it’s just that it’s not ideal for the audience and could easily be better.
Thus, the 5 things you’re doing wrong on social media right now. (And hey – if you’re not doing these wrong, share this and and let us break the news to Mrs. R. that she is.)
1. Over-hashtagging
This problem has two iterations:
- You’re using too many hashtags. We would argue that almost all content can be made adequately searchable with three hashtags. Using 16 makes you look desperate and unfocused.
- #everythingisnotahashtag. Let’s start with the purpose of a hashtag: to group things together so interested people can find content they care about or follow along with topics. They are not supposed to be rambling, impossible-to-read, or “hilarious” captions. If you want to caption a photo, caption it. Then use hashtags to catalogue content and connect with people like the social gods intended.
2. Liking your own stuff
This one you’re likely doing without even knowing it. If you are the admin of a Facebook page, iPad and iPhone Facebook apps are problematic – They don’t allow you to easily like or comment as yourself when you’re interacting with that page’s content. So, you end up liking something AS that page rather than as yourself, which looks needy. Use the desktop version of Facebook to like or comment on posts for the pages you manage.
3. Autoposting across platforms
If you have your Facebook posts automatically set to post to Twitter (or vice versa), it’s time to press pause. Seeing “I posted a new photo to Facebook” on Twitter is frustrating for two reasons:
- People have to click on the link to see what you posted, which takes them off of their preferred platform and makes them less likely to see or engage with your content.
- It’s not aesthetically pleasing, it’s obviously automated, and you’re showing users that you don’t think Twitter is an important enough platform to devote your time to using it in the way that benefits them most.
Furthermore, many scheduling platforms like Hootsuite won’t post pictures natively to Google+ or Twitter, so users will just see links where they would see embedded photos if you made the extra effort. It’s worth the three minutes it takes to do it right, especially now that Twitter will let you schedule tweets in advance.
4. Using the same teasers on all platforms
If you aren’t customizing your teaser posts by platform, you’re missing opportunities. While social platforms will sometimes pick up trends from other social sites (see Facebook hashtagging and its subsequent backlash), they’ve all still got their own quirks, which are easy to master if you take them one by one.
For example:
- Facebook posts can be longer, and you can remove the URL once Facebook has populated the post with it. You can also spread out your text a little more, so consider what’s most pleasing to the eye. And pass on the hashtags.
- For Twitter, use a URL shortener and multiple hashtags. Also, test your hashtags on Twitter before posting to see what tags people who are engaging with your kind of content are using. For example, if you’re posting an article about parenting tips, see if #parenting or #parents hits the right note; #parents might pull up people saying funny things about their parents while #parenting pulls up discussions of how people are trying to be better parents. They are small nuances, but they make a difference.
- For Google+, you need to choose one hashtag; Google+ only sorts by the first hashtagged term, not necessarily the most important, so you need to decide how you want your post categorized. Also post timing on Google+ should be different from most of the other platforms since posts tend to do better from 9:00-11:00 a.m., which is not the same timeframe that works best for Facebook or Twitter.
- On LinkedIn, you can post longer things like you can on Facebook, but you should tailor your tone to be more professional. Also, LinkedIn will automatically transform your links into shorter links (ex. http://lnkd.in/bHmxzGX), so you can post your content first to LinkedIn and then use that shortened URL elsewhere to save some time.
5. Tweeting from Instagram
A follow-up to the autoposting point, this tip is more about not connecting every social account just because you can. Even though you have to choose where you’d like to share each Instagram photo you take, consider what happens when you tweet out that photo: Twitter has not yet acquiesced to users’ requests that Instagram photos be shown natively like photos posted directly to Twitter are, so users have to click a link to see your photo, which can discourage or frustrate them.
And we know – it’s so much more convenient to post a photo directly from Instagram to Twitter, but think about the end user. If you must do it, make sure to explain what the photo is rather than using exclamations like “Can’t believe this crazy thing happened today!” since people will have no idea what you’re talking about until they click the link, which they’re less likely to do if they have no idea what it is.
Overall, it comes down to time and effort, but it doesn’t take a lot of either to make sure your business appears professional on social media. Take the extra time and make the extra effort and your audience will respond.