Chapter 17
Ten Social Media Engagement Mistakes to Avoid
In This Chapter
Skipping the planning step
Leaving a robotic impression
Focusing on yourself rather than on your community
Posting erratically
Failing to let your personality shine
Neglecting to listen to your community
Underestimating the effort involved
Annoying your community with unwanted content
Disregarding original material
Making the same mistakes again and again
What fun would it be if we failed to list the pitfalls you must avoid when wading into the wide and wonderful world of social media engagement? There are many ways to plan how to do things well, yet just as many small (and big) ways to make a misstep. Plan ways to avoid making these ten mistakes as you plan your best strategy for engagement, and you’ll be well on your way to success.
Flying by the Seat of Your Pants
Sure, you’ve been engaging your entire life, but social media engagement is a whole new animal, and it requires a plan. Running out to sign up for Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ with no thought to how you will dedicate time to connect with your community or respond to them after they realize that you’re online would be disastrous. You must determine not only who will be in charge of your social media engagement but also which platforms are appropriate for your brand or business.
Take the time to put an action plan in place so that you’re prepared to engage with your audience and ready to respond when they reach out to you — because they will, and they want to know that you’re listening.
Operating without a plan can lead you down a path of missteps — one that can be detrimental to your business and brand reputation.
Using Too Much Automation
We understand that you may want to automate some content because you can’t sit in front of your computer 24 hours a day, and it’s certainly impossible to be on all your platforms at any given time. Do too much automating, however, and your community will peg you as a robot. If they respond to your automated content and you never reply, they eventually give up.
Take the time to balance the pins, videos, Facebook and Twitter posts you share, and schedule specific slots during the day when you follow up on the chosen platforms to ensure that you’re engaging with your audience. The time you take to have a conversation, to respond, and to let your community know that you’re listening makes all the difference in making real connections with real people.
Broadcasting or Sharing Only Your Content
We know you’ve had the experience of meeting someone new who can’t help but talk on and on about himself. This behavior seems harmless at first . . . and then slightly annoying . . . and then intolerable. In terms of social media engagement, your audience is initially curious about you, but after being incessantly bombarded with your products and posts about how wonderful you are, they’re first bored and irritated, and then they become turned off by your self-centered attitude. They’ll deliberately make the extra effort to unfollow you while simultaneously signaling their action to all their friends.
Choose the alternative: Make your engagement a two-way street. Talk, share valuable content from other people, praise others, have conversations, and reply to comments and questions.
Your community is made up of people who care about how you treat them — not just what you offer as products or services.
Being Inconsistent
Suppose that you post five times on Monday and then post nothing again until Thursday. You post a video on Tuesday, update Google+ and Facebook on Friday, spend two hours on Pinterest on Sunday, and then disappear for a week, leaving questions unanswered and replies swinging in the social media wind. Your community of customers and prospects doesn’t know what to think of your erratic behavior. Do you want to engage or not? Inconsistency will grow old quickly, and your audience will disappear as they realize that they can’t rely on you to be present regularly. You’ll come across as though you’re not listening — and nobody likes to be ignored.
Instead, set a schedule. Choose the platforms that generate the most value for you and your brand, and then make a commitment to them. Make the time to engage. Consistency has its rewards, including stronger connections with others.
Lacking Personality
Human beings connect to other human beings. If people see you as simply a logo on a computer screen, it’s difficult for them to connect with you. Social media must be social. You’re naturally drawn to the people and relationships that make you laugh, that make you think, that bring out the best in you — as are your customers and prospects in social networks. Be personable. Be kind. Everything you say online reflects on you and your brand. Put someone at the helm of your brand engagement who is willing to push the envelope and able to come across as genuine, friendly, and approachable.
Keep in mind that you, as a brand or business, should determine ahead of time what brand personality will be reflected online: wise, witty, sharp, intelligent, humorous, earnest, or informative. After you make that decision, go for it!
Ignoring Feedback
Your community uses your social media platforms as a way to tell you that they love you — but also that they’re disappointed in you. A simple thank-you for a compliment can go a long way. Acknowledging positive comments says to someone that you’re listening, and being heard resonates with a person.
Alternatively, ignoring a customer’s negative feedback can be detrimental to your brand. Know that your community watches to see how you handle both the good and the bad. Burying or dismissing the bad makes you appear as though you have something to hide. Handle online negativity with care and concern. Deal out in the open (for the most part) with complaints that are made publicly. Others will see your good customer service in action, potentially earning you a new, reinforced fan base and often turning a disgruntled customer into a happy and loyal one.
Give your community the opportunity to see you as a responsive brand with caring individuals behind the logo. You will be amazed at how closely your customer service interactions in social media are followed and even shared with others.
Assuming That Social Media Is Easy
Social media engagement, friends, is hard work. Creating a social media engagement strategy for your business or brand, putting it into action, monitoring it, engaging with your community, tweaking the plan, and ensuring that you’re present takes time and effort, and a lot of it. To assume that you can invest just a little bit of time — that you can “dial it in” in less than an hour or two a week — will be the death of your efforts. Social media engagement, as a way to build your business, isn’t a cakewalk. It’s an ongoing learning process that is ever-changing. Every day, you schedule, implement your plan, and modify the plan based on your successes — and then you have (you hope) the benefit of seeing your hard work pay off. But you definitely don’t have the luxury of sitting back and watching it happen for you.
Spamming
Spamming others is easily one of the worst errors you can make. Sending out link after link, e-mail after e-mail, or pin after pin of the same content or of commercials gets you nowhere. No one wants to be spammed by an endless stream of your sales pitches, or by your links or lists of why your audience simply must be following your every move. Always have your community’s permission to send them your information, and remember how easily they can opt out of receiving it.
Whether you spam e-mail inboxes with unrequested content or cram your social network feeds with one-sided announcements, nothing turns off a potential fan or customer more quickly than spam. Just don’t do it.
Posting the Same Content Everywhere
You can easily copy and paste your content from Twitter to Google+ to LinkedIn or cross-post the same content to all your social networks at one time by using a messaging tool. Your audiences on each platform deserve more than that, however. Fans who follow you on more than one network may quickly spot the repeats, making you appear lazy and unoriginal. Though the occasional cross-posting doesn’t signal the end of the world, take the time to tailor your content for each network: What engages well on Facebook may need to be tweaked for Twitter. Being specific to each network requires more work and more effort, but the difference in the level of engagement is noticeable.
Repeating Mistakes
Pay attention to what is happening when you’re engaging with your community online. You’ll do some things well, such as post content that resonates with your audience, tweets that are retweeted, videos that are shared, and Instagram pictures that make your community giddy. And some of your messages will backfire, Facebook updates will fall flat, or employees will convey the wrong messages in your stream. Take note of what works, and do more of it. Note what didn’t work, and avoid repeating those same errors. Have a plan for recovering from errors, notice when they happen, respond immediately and take responsibility, and then learn from your mistakes.