10. Dos and Don’ts of Social Media

When being active on social media, you will establish a plan that will include a certain set of activities. Whether you will be conducting the social media strategy on your own or you will hire a person who will do that for you, you need to establish a set of rules, what to do and what not to do when being active on social media. This will help you with being consistent and using the planned methods and approaches in the process of realization of social media marketing strategy. 

Social Media Dos

The following set of actions includes the things you should do on social media in order to maximize the effect of your social media strategy and increase engagement.

Post

The essential activity of you social media presence is posting. Regardless of the social network you choose, regardless of the type of content that is typically shared on that social network, if you want to succeed in social media marketing you have to be active, primarily by posting.

When posting on a regular basis your accounts are being updated regularly, which shows that there is a person running that account. This is important information for users who want to use social media account to reach you, if they need help or more details about your business.

Interact

Besides posting content, another equally important activity on social media is interaction. The primary goal of social networks was to enable interaction among users, and this is something that is still a significant element of social networks. There are numerous ways people can interact on social networks, and different features introduced by social media encourage interaction among the users.

Your main goal is interaction with the clients and potential clients, as this can significantly improve your business. However, if you want to make the most out of your social media presence, you should also focus on interaction with other companies, influential business professionals and people related to the industry that your company is in. Finally, interaction increases visibility of your account, which leads to even more chances of promoting your business.

Share

While posting original and unique content is highly encouraged as that type of content provides value and is most helpful, sharing someone’s content can be a nice way to diversify and supplement your posting activity. You can share a status update, a video or a blog article, if you think it is relevant to your followers.

However, you should consider sharing occasionally, as the focus of your social media marketing is to promote your business through your own content.

Respond

Responding to your followers who are thinking about becoming your clients or might already be your clients is crucial for establishing long-term relationship and increasing the level of loyalty. Social followers need to know that they can count on you to provide necessary information and help, as this can influence their decision to be your customers in the future. You should try to provide helpful response in a short time period.

Keep up with current trends

There have been many events and trends on social media that usually spread all over the internet and reach a huge number of people. The great virality of these events is also accompanied by the usage of a certain hashtag that helps people mark their content as being the part of global social media event or trend.

You should keep up with these trends, and if appropriate join them, as this can be a good way to show support or participate in a global activity. In addition, this might help you reach some new people and discover other business that might be related to your business in some way.

Diversify

The combination of all the activities stated above, and different social media approaches, is the perfect recipe for keeping fresh and diversifying content and activities on your social media account.

Social media don’ts

Here are the things to avoid when posting on social networks as those can have negative effect on the popularity and credibility of your social media accounts, and ultimately reduce the influence of you brand.

Copy other people’s content

While occasionally sharing other people’s content can be helpful and it is important to keep an eye on your competitors, in general you should avoid copying what other social media users do or share on social networks. This kind of content provides no value to your social media followers, and it can only harm your social media marketing.

Neglect your social media account

Social media marketing demands a continuous effort in being present on social media, and if you neglect your social media account, you will get back to the starting point, and you will see no positive results. It is not enough to create a social media account and expect it to become popular or to improve your business on its own. Social media marketing requires effort and time necessary to be invested in having an active and popular social media account.

Ignore your followers

You must avoid ignoring your social followers regardless the circumstances. People might want to praise your company, they might need question answered or they just want to express their dissatisfaction with the product or services you provide, and nowadays, people are most likely to use social networks for this purpose. In all of these situations, you as a representative of a company, have to provide response in a timely manner. Not only does this help the people who posted the praise or a potential problem, but this kind of conversation will also be visible to the other social network users, which might affect those who are to become you prospective customers.

Complete automation of the account

While automation is an important part of social media marketing, as we shall see in one of the following chapters, you should avoid using tools to completely automate your account. The main drawback of automation is the fact that you will not be able to respond to the followers. Furthermore, your account might seem artificial, and this kind of approach is not likely to get people to follow you or interact with you. No followers or engagement means your social media marketing will be completely unsuccessful as you will fail in promoting your brand on social networks.