Bad social media behavior
Success with social media isn’t just learning how to use the technology to communicate with people. As people learn how to use the technology, they may feel they’ve mastered social media, but in truth successfully using social media is more subtle than that. The reality is that social media isn’t the technology we use, but the social behaviors we engage in while using that technology. The technology is the interface, but the success is the social behaviors. The following are some social behaviors that aren’t successful.
Sending mass invites out for your events. I’ve been guilty of this behavior myself, and it’s not a very successful social media behavior. For one thing, if you send mass invites out to everyone what will happen is you will annoy the people that the invite doesn’t apply to and they will be less inclined to interact with you as a result. You will get emails requesting that you take them off your events list.
Posting or tweeting with links to your website, and no other kind of interaction. No one likes being advertised to and when the only message you send out is a tweet or post with a link to your website or blog, people will feel that you are just trying to get them to your website without genuinely engaging them. Your messages will come off as advertisements, which is the least level of engagement possible.
Sending automatic DM’s to people. Sending an automatic direct message, especially with a link comes off as insincere and suggests that you’re trying to get something from your followers. It starts the relationship out on the wrong foot and leads people to feel that you don’t want to get to know them.
Sending the standard, generic invite when you want to connect with someone. When I get an invitation from Linkedin, where the person hasn’t taken time to personalize it and indicate why they want to connect with me, or how they met me, I feel like that person hasn’t made the effort to establish a reason for why I should connect with that person.
Not taking time to acknowledge or respond to people’s efforts to help you. It doesn’t take much to acknowledge someone retweeting you or otherwise helping you out. When you don’t it comes off as rude and inconsiderate of the effort other people made.
These are just a few bad social media behaviors. What are some you’ve observed, or maybe even done yourself?
These are very good comments. I wish more people would consider these.
Hi Amy,
I wish they would as well. I think as more awareness occurs around this issue, peopel will change their behaviors accordingly.