Brands: Stop Doing These 6 Annoying Things on Social Media
Get off my lawn! No, but seriously. It’s easy to release my inner curmudgeon these days with all the various social media platforms I download my physical body into and go to work. Yes, like Tron but less cool. Okay, I only play Daft Punk and pretend I’m in the Matrix or something cool but I’m really sitting at my desk. Whatever, we all have our thing.
What I’m saying is that I see a lot of brands out here in the sea of social media. There are some great things and some things I think we are all getting a bit tired of. Here are six that cause the eyes to roll:
- Social Squatting
We’ve all seen those accounts that sit there, stagnate, and rarely give anything but the odd retweet or update. It seems like an account was created and then it was forgotten about like a sad sandwich in the back of the fridge. If accounts could have cobwebs, these would have them. It stinks because you see so many lost opportunities to connect with customers and the community when they are mentioned but never talk back. - Follows and Runs
I see this a lot from publicity pushers, “experts”, and the like. You wake up one Saturday morning and see that glorious notification that you have a new follower. “AH! What kind fate shines upon me this day!?” And by Sunday’s eve, you’re wondering where they went. Perhaps this is the worst attempt, aside from buying followers (see below), at gaining a mutual follow but it ends with sadness for all involved. I ain’t no holla back boy, to quote the great Gwen Stefani. This makes your account look self important and desperate. - Links Fever
There are some accounts that function soley to provide links to various destinations, few are places we want to go. It particularly hurts to see actual humans doing this and only posting links to their latest blog or article. There’s no interaction, just a timeline of Bitly links that will never reach their full potential. Interaction and genuine communication have been long forgotten. It’s like LinkedIn has taken the form of a human or somebody blacked out and linked their Facebook to Twitter while uploading an entire album of photos. - Content with Poor Content
We all deal with this on a day-to-day basis. Those posts that look like a web banner ad fell into a hole that opened on your timeline. We’re also talking about a shared clickbait article or a stolen meme that was taken from another meme and now the quality is so bad and pixelated you can barely see it. This happens when the average person is left to their own devices, but when brands follow the trend with posting low quality content it makes it easy for the mind and eye to ignore. It’s even worse if accounts don’t bother to come up with original content or allow creative with errors and the like to go out. - Buying Followers
Let this be clear and never brought up again. It’s never a good idea to buy followers. There’s a certain idea that tells people they need to have thousands of followers to be seen as legitimate or influential. This idea is no more effective than lighting your own hair on fire in a desert and hoping for rain. It just doesn’t work if you’re trying to get your content in front of the right people. You want people who are real and who would actually be interested in what you have to say. I don’t even know where one would go to buy followers, but it happens. It would be a better use to set your money on fire. - Bandwagon Bandits
We’ve seen brands fall prey to this before. Using a trending hashtag or topic in hopes of getting exposure or a few LOLs and retweets. The best success you can have is to not do this just because you see it. Think it through and be sure to know the context and meanings behind things. Have a strategy for hot trends and when to utilize them and when not to. It’s a very risky game you don’t have to play.
