Rules of Social Media Marketing or How Not To Annoy Your Followers

Admin   |   20 July, 2015   |   2689   |   3980

Social media is a powerful tool for your network marketing business. But many reps do not know how to use social media effectively, and worse yet, some even make pretty big mistakes that cause people not want to follow them on social media. If you have noticed that you are losing followers and don’t have as much success with social media as you did previously, you might need to go through this checklist for each of your social media accounts and find out just where the problem is.

How You Engage with Your Followers

When you engage with your followers, you cause them to become invested into your business through social media. You can have followers and not be engaged with any of them, and your returns are going to be extremely low until you start engaging.

Since social media changes so fast, you really need to pay attention to what your readers are saying, whether that is through analytics or interacting through YouTube comments. Pay attention to what your followers are saying, and more importantly, what they are not saying. Those are good things to keep in mind, but there are also some “don’ts” that you should familiarize yourself with to make sure that you aren’t committing any of these social media sins.

Spread Your Tweets Out

While it can be difficult to find the time to send tweets out throughout the hour or day, it is worth it. Studies that have looked at why people stop following brands and companies listed tweet “bursting” as a big reason. It can be tempting to send all of your tweets for the day out all at once, but you’ll very likely lose followers.

Don’t Join Groups Just to Promote Your Product

There is a right way and a wrong way to go about promoting yourself in groups that you’ve joined. First, make sure that they are relevant to the product or service that you are offering. You can find groups on Facebook or through LinkedIn. However, once you have joined the relevant group, don’t just go in and start posting advertisements. This will not win you any popularity contests or social media followers, and it might even get you banned. You should contribute something useful to the group before you ever promote your product or service.

Follow Proper Group Etiquette

If you have joined a group there are some pretty basic things that hold true for all groups. For example, stay away from posting on controversial subjects like sex, politics and religion, don’t be negative and post how much you hate your boss. Don’t hijack the thread (take the topic to a whole new direction) and most of all, read and follow the group rules.

Stay Away From Automated Messages

Automated direct messages when someone follows you on Twitter immediately gives the impression that you are going to be promoting to them, and they might just unfollow you right then and there. Other automated messages are a bad idea too.

Use Twitter Hashtags Properly

Hashtags can be great tools for your marketing on social media, but you want to use them properly. Make sure that they are relevant, easy to remember and short: the shorter the better. Don’t use hashtags as a way to get more followers because that just looks unprofessional. For example: #Follow4Follow.  Don’t use more than two hashtags most of the time, although three is permissible as long as you use hashtags sparingly. Also, consider minimizing their use or cutting them out entirely on Facebook.

Post Content Other Than Your Own

You shouldn’t just post your own content on social media. If you find something that is useful and beneficial to your reps, go ahead and post it. Many people are hesitant to do this because they think that if someone follows a link to a third-party website they’ll never come back. However, posting content other than your own will build relationships with the owner of the content that you post and also let your followers see that you are posting useful information just for them, even if it’s not your own.

Avoid Facebook Tags Unless You Have Permission

When you tag someone in a photo on Facebook, you link to that person or company’s profile. This is a great feature but it can easily be abused. Don’t tag people that you don’t know in order to get their attention, and don’t tag yourself in a photo unless you actually are in a photo.

Say Thank You

When someone likes one of your posts or retweets something that you’ve posted to Twitter, you should thank them once in a while. Of course, you can’t thank every single person that likes one of your posts on Facebook, nor can you always thank people on Twitter when they retweet something that you said. But a nice thank you once in a while goes a long way and will help you build better social media relationships and let your followers know that you appreciate them.

Don’t Abuse Your Network

You don’t need to post to your followers about how your day is going, or where you went for lunch. Posting status updates once in a while is okay, but if you don’t have anything good to post, then you should probably not post anything at all.

The Bottom Line: Don’t Be Annoying

You want your followers to keep following you on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. If you post too often, be overly promotional or do any of the other things that are on this list, you will have a much harder time getting and keeping followers. Remember, you want to give your followers value for following you, and that means giving them content that isn’t always your own and keeping your own promotions to a minimum. Do these things and you’ll be a much better person to follow on social media.

Source: teamtlcmarketing.com