The Social Media Top Ten Don’t List
Too often, I see people misusing social media, so I compiled this list of ten ways you should not use social media sites. I am sure more could be added to this list. Would you add any? I’d love to hear from you.
1. Don’t tweet about yourself and/or your products all day. People will notice if you only talk about yourself and link to your site.
2. Don’t send e-mails to webmasters of other sites, asking them to exchange links with you. Yes, you can still do this, as long as it’s within Google’s guidelines, but it’s not effective. Here’s what Google has to say about building links.
3. Don’t Add people to Facebook groups without their permission. Yes, Facebook enabled a group feature in which group owners can add people. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did this to better monitor which users are using Facebook for self-serving purposes.
4. Don’t comment spam on people’s blogs just to get links back to your blog. Write thoughtful responses rather than copying and pasting canned blog comment responses.
5. Don’t post comments on blogs that have nothing to do with your site. Google looks at what types of sites link to you. They want to see that quality sites similar to your site link to you.
6. Don’t Ignore people. It doesn’t take that much time to answer a person’s question, thank them for a retweet, or just engage.
7. Don’t buy Twitter followers and Facebook friends. People who do this are breaking Twitter’s TOS. While I can find nothing in Facebook’s TOS about auto-friends, they will suspend your account if you make too many friends requests at once.
8. Don’t Tweet about where you are and what you’re doing, unless it serves your bottom line. It’s okay to send out occasional personal updates because that helps keep social media social, but people don’t need to know about your personal life every 15 minutes.
9. Don’t sign up for a social media service and then leave it. It’s easy to sign-up for a social bookmarking site, decide it’s not worth the time to use a site that ranks 50,000 according to Alexa, get frustrated because you can’t figure out how to delete your account, and then forget about it.
10. Don’t use social media to spam people. This includes posting 20 tweets at once, sending your followers continuous direct messages about your site or products, or using social media for guerilla marketing and not social engagement.
Stay social my friends,
Erick
