Swear Off These Bad Habits on Social Media

Swear Off These Bad Habits on Social Media

Swear Off These Bad Habits on Social Media

Swear Off These Bad Habits on Social Media

 

If you’re using social media to expand your connections with customers, make sure you don’t fall for one of these bad habits. Forbes.com highlights a few:

Auto-Posting from Facebook to Twitter

Your audiences for each social network likely differ slightly, so your messaging should change slightly, too. “Facebook posts that are auto-shared to Twitter are often cut off and missing images, presenting an unpolished and unprofessional appearance to followers,” columnist Brent Gleeson writes at Forbes.com. Several tools such as HootSuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer make sharing easy across multiple social networks.

Talking at Customers, Not With Them

Social media does not equate to free advertising. “Stop posting only about your brand, and start using social media for what it was intended: communication between humans,” Gleeson notes. “Imagine if you went to a holiday party this year and only talked about yourself and your selling points.” Ask your followers questions, reply to their comments, and engage with those who have similar interests to you, Gleeson says.

Failing to Track Your Links

Know which social media posts are connecting most with your network and bringing in the highest volume of traffic to your website. “Brands are still frequently posting untracked or shortened links back to their website, therefore only measuring how many visitors came from each social media channel or how many clicks each link received,” Gleeson writes. “Tracking your links with something like Google Analytics’ URL Builder will allow you to see how much traffic came from each post you shared and the quality of that traffic with metrics such as bounce rate, average session duration, and average pages viewed per session.”

Source: “5 Things You Should Stop Doing in Social Media Marketing by 2016,” Forbes (Dec. 15, 2015)