Understanding social media etiquette is an extremely important part of your overall strategy. Most of these rules can be felt out and intuited after spending time on the various platforms. However, it’s never a bad idea to over prepare and make sure you’re not doing anything that could negatively affect your image.
Sales Spam
Yes, you want to improve your ROI, and you know that social media is a great way to do that. However, if you are just plastering every single social update with a sales pitch, you will not be forging any real relationships. In fact, you’ll be lucky if any of your interactions are real people and not just bots.
Automation
Automation in social media can be a very powerful thing, especially if you are running many aspects of your business or agency without help from an external marketing person. That being said, automation should not be your scapegoat to avoid engaging on these platforms. You will have much more success if you are able to be on the channel yourself for even 10 to 15 minutes a day.
Auto-Messaging
A special note for Twitter users: Twitter has a system that allows private messaging between followers. Auto DM (direct message) is a feature that has crept into existence recently. These are messages that will automatically be sent to new followers. Most of the time, they include a brief sales pitch and a link of some kind. These are not genuine interactions, and, while it might get you a few clicks on your link, it can cause you to lose your most recent follow. Think of these messages as unsolicited sales calls.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this guide, or join the conversation on Twitter.
