Social networks can become a powerful ally when it comes to increasing the visibility of your profile as they allow you to reach your target audience and enhance your brand image. However, incorrect management of business profiles can have totally counterproductive results. Check out these ten bad habits that you should never incur if you want to harness the potential of social networks for your business.
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1. Ignore your audience
Let’s be clear, if the critical comments of your followers bother you and you are not willing to devote some time to your profiles and prefer not to answer any questions through the networks, why be in them? Your followers provide valuable information to improve your project, as long as you are willing to listen to them.
2. Generate low quality content
Or write articles that offer absolutely nothing to the audience. We have to be more creative and offer an added value to our audience. It is best not to post meaningless content as it can strongly harm the image of your company or yourself as a professional. Everything that is published must generate some kind of value to the audience, as well as be engaging and visually pleasing. Uninteresting or boring posts will only result in your audience to unfollow you.
3. Make random posts
If you must post something on your social networks, it’s important that your content makes full sense and is coherent. Similarly, it is not advisable to be actively present in all the social networks out there and aim to post something different in each one. The most sensible thing to do is to select which platforms best suit your project and build a content strategy in order to get the most out of them.
Although all social networks have a number of common features, it is obvious that Twitter, Facebook or Instagram are not exactly the same. For example, in Twitter, you must synthesise your hashtag in a tweet, while an Instagram post must be original and visually pleasing. It is not advisable, therefore, to use all the social networks the same way.
Using social networks to share links on your own or other people’s blogs is not a bad practice per se. The problem comes when it becomes a habit and links to other pages are shared almost every day. This can tire your followers and that they end up seeing the profile as a mere news aggregator.
Linked with the previous point, even more serious is the publication or redeployment of links or news that include false or offensive content. Pay attention to the source you are using to write your post and never trust those websites that do not look credible. Sharing fake news in your social networks can detract from your profiles’ credibility.
7. Speak badly about your competitors
In a market economy, we are all required to compete to stand out in our sector and gain market share. However, this does not justify the use of social networks to send negative messages about our main competitors. Firstly, it denotes a total lack of sensitivity and fair play that does not exactly leave you in a good position. Secondly, it can give the impression that you are uneasy about the other people’s progress.
8. Do not carry out tests
Social networks evolve at the same pace as society, that is, in an accelerated manner. Therefore, profiles should be updated periodically both in terms of design and in terms of communication strategy itself. To do this, it is mandatory to carry out tests to see what changes have the most impact in your posts. Try different schedules, experiment with different types of content (texts, videos …), vary how often you post and modify the number of characters or words as part of your routine tests.
9. Ignore the statistics
Social networks generate a series of metrics that let you know whether something is going as planned or confirm that the followed strategy is actually working. In any case, it is necessary to monitor the development of the statistics with some regularity. With this data you will know when you can generate more interactions, where the audience comes from and which posts have had the most impact.
Scheduling posts or automating some of the functions of social networks is a great tool to use but that can never completely replace your interaction with these platforms. Your users expect to receive personalised responses from you and by abusing the automatic tools, you may reduce interactions.
