Social media is here to stay and it’s a fantastic tool for building your personal brand. But, like any other tool, if you don’t use it properly, you may do more harm than good. Here are five bad behaviours to avoid when building your brand online:
1. Treating your audience badly
You’ve taken the time to set up social media accounts and announce them to your clients. If you then ignore clients who try to interact with you through social media, or take forever to respond, you’ve lost the plot and you’re damaging your brand.
- Seeing social media as a sales channel.
Yes, social media can be a useful sales tool, but spamming your social media audience with constant sales content will just chase people away. There is a place for sales on social media (like offering discounts of special offers), but using it as a one-way channel for sales defeats the whole point – engaging with your followers authentically.
- Repeating yourself ad nauseam
If your audience is listening, they’ll hear what you say the first time. And if they’re not listening, they won’t hear you no matter how many times you repeat your message. Obviously, repeating something like a special discount a couple of times may work for you, but don’t post the same Tweet or Facebook status every day or multiple times in the space of a few seconds.
- Thinking all social media is the same
It’s ok to use some of the same content on multiple platforms sometimes. But remember that you may have fans following you on more than one channel. Sending out the same content across all channels all the time may be irritating to those people and make it seem like you don’t put much thought into your interactions. The type of content that is suitable for Pinterest or Instagram is different to what’s a good fit on LinkedIn or Facebook.
- Constantly promoting one channel on another
You may have decided that Facebook is the best platform for your personal or business brand. But someone told you that you should be on Twitter too, so you’ve opened an account and every day you post a Tweet telling the Twitter folk to visit your Facebook page because it’s where all the good stuff happens. Chances are that you’re not going to be very popular on Twitter. Either stick to your preferred platform, or realise the different advantages that each channel offers and tailor your communications to suit that particular medium. Also ask yourself where your audience hangs out. If you’re a Facebook fanatic but your audience prefers LinkedIn, you’re in the wrong place.
Remember, the most important thing in social media is to always be relevant and add value. You want people to be reading you all the time, not tuning you out.
