55 Do’s and Don’ts Of Social Media Marketing You Need to Know

Social media can help you achieve a lot of marketing goals for your business.

It has an immense marketing power, and that’s also why more and more brands are slowly hopping on the social media marketing train, as they are realizing the incredible marketing power of social media and all the benefits that a strong presence has.

I could spend this whole article listing all the statistics that social media generates to prove its power, but chances are, you’re already aware of all that.

There’s a catch with social media marketing though.

The statistics and results you see are incredible and very impressive. But apart from what some actually tend to believe, you won’t generate any results or come anywhere near the statistics you are seeing if you aren’t having a clear strategy and execute on a  daily basis.

To succeed in social media you need to know the strategies that work, and those that don’t work. You need to be aware of the do’s and don’ts of social media to know what helps you reach your goal quicker, but you also need to know what slows you down in reaching your goal.

Social media can generate incredible marketing results, and that’s also the reason why 88% of companies are using social media for marketing. I think it’s safe to say that unless you’re using social media to market your business, you’re missing out on incredible opportunities. You might be using social media but just upload a few posts every now and then, and then wait for the results to roll in. But that won’t happen.

In this article, I’ll be listing 55 Do’s and Don’ts Of Social Media Marketing You Need to Know.

so you can generate better results from your efforts, and focus on the efforts that bring results.

Do’s of social media marketing

Be patient

Nothing worth having comes easy, and success doesn’t happen overnight. Without patience, there is a risk that you’ll quit before a big boom comes. If you’re going to use social media, be aware of the fact that great results are going to take time.

What are you in a hurry for? You know what will happen when you’re impatient?

You’ll work with something for a few weeks or months, and then you’ll quit because you don’t think that you’ve achieved the results you want.

And what you do then start with something new and then work with that for a few weeks or months, and then give up with that too!

Everything worth having takes time, and if you don’t realize that, then you’ll have a hard time generating the same results as the statistics prove, because the truth is, those have been achieved with plenty of hard work and a great patience.

When it comes to relying on organic reach and free marketing on social media, you need to have an even greater patience than if you’re paying for exposure. If you’re paying, for example, social media ads, you can just pour more money into it and generate better results quicker. You just let your money work for you.

But doing so, you need a lot of money to invest. Three thing is, though, that even if you invest a lot of money, you need to have a great profile and great content. Money can do a lot, but you will have to work actively with your social media page still if you want great results.

Know your target audience

Knowing your target audience is crucial for all parts of business and marketing, whether you’re working with social media marketing or creating billboard ads.

As a whole, knowing your target audience will allow you to craft better messages and content that resonates and speak to your target audience. This goes for social media, but all parts of marketing as well. If you create a billboard and then include a boring joke that only 80+ year-olds would laugh at when you have a target audience of people who are 20-35, then you are doing it wrong.

The second reason you need to know your target audience is that it allows you to target them better on social media. When you know who it is you are targeting, you can start thinking about where your target audience spends time.

This article will help you get started with finding your target audience:

How To Easily Identify And Find Your Target Audience On Social Media

If you don’t know your target audience, there’s a great risk that you’öö only standing there, creating content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience, resulting in you wasting your efforts.

Post daily and regularly

Some people have a set and forget mentality on social media.

This is a big mistake.

If you want to achieve the best results possible, you need to be active and post regularly. If you let weeks or even months pass between your posts, people will believe you have quit using the platform and forget about you. What’s more, when you aren’t posting, you aren’t reminding your audience about your brand’s existence, nor are you getting any marketing results from it.

Posting daily is, together with the content you share, the foundations of social media success. Set a schedule for when you are going to post and follow that. When you post regularly and at the same times every time, people will learn when they can expect a post from you.

Create a social media strategy

Without a social media strategy, you’ll struggle a lot.

A social media strategy is like a blueprint that tells you exactly what needs to be done, why you are going to do it, and how it’s going to be done.

In other words, your social media is a roadmap that tells you exactly where you are going and how you’re going to get there.

Without having a strategy, you’ll struggle a lot more on social media, and you’ll also end up wasting more time. This goes for anything in marketing, really.

You need a plan that tells you where you need to go and how you’re going to get there, and that allows you to look back and ask yourself if you are working in the right direction, and doing things that help you get closer to your goal.

Just like building a house, it is possible to work with social media without a strategy, but chances are,  the result won’t be as good, it will take longer time, and it might even cost more.

Create a content strategy

The content you share is the foundation for your social media success. After all, it is your content that is your value proposition and that drives people to you. If you don’t have any content, people won’t have a reason to stick with you.

The content strategy is a part of your social media strategy, as the strategy is a guide on how you’re going to manage all aspects of your social media presence in the best possible way but since the content is such an important part of social media, it is often done separately.

Related: The Complete Guide to Developing a Social Media Content Strategy

Your content strategy is essentially a smaller part of your social media strategy. It tells you what you need to do, how you’re going to do it, and why you’re going to do it. The only difference is that it only focuses on the content you are going to create and distribute.

Have your logo as your profile picture

A simple yet important touch for social media.

Note that this is only true for brands. If you’re a person trying to build your personal brand, you should most definitely have a face shot of yourself as your profile picture because it’s proven that humans related better with humans, plus, it helps make your face more recognized.

Know how to listen

This goes both for when you are talking to your customers and audience, but also when they are talking and they expect or don’t expect you to listen.

On social media, this is called social listening.

This means that you’re actively scanning social media for interesting conversations that are taking place, mainly about your brand, which you can hop into and engage with.

Some conversations expect your response, so hop into these conversations. These can be anything from questions about ordering to customer complaints. Some conversations don’t expect your response, but hopping into them can still be extremely valuable for your brand as it shows that you care about your audience. Plus, it is a great opportunity for you to bring value to your audience.

Very few brands take the time to listen on social media, and as a result, they’re missing out on valuable feedback from their audience, complaints that lead to lost customers, and so on.

Learn to listen to the conversations that are taking place and then engage with your audience accordingly.

The best part is that the more you listen, the better you’ll get to know your audience.

And when you know your target audience better, you can tailor messages and marketing to them so they resonate with it perfectly.

Remember that social media is called social media for a reason. And in order to be social, and to have a conversation, you need to actually listen – and then talk.

If you are going to be a good listen, you can’t schedule posts ahead of time and automate most of your social media. The human touch is crucial for listening to your audience. Don’t forget that.

Be transparent

Transparency is important as a brand, and on social media to say the least.

92% of people trust peer recommendations. This also refers to recommendations from people they don’t directly know, such as influencers.

At the same time, almost 70% of consumers don’t trust advertising and 42% distrust brands. The reason?

People know that brands have one goal and one goal only:

To sell more.

Influencers and peers, on the other hand, we trust and therefore see them as more transparent and trustworthy.

As a brand. you obviously want to improve your trust rate, and this can be done by being more transparent, even if it is difficult.

Be more open and show the things that are less good about your brand and products every now and them. Don’t pretend like you’re perfect and your products are too, but admit your flaws as it will make you more human and trustworthy.

Show appreciation

Always, always, always show appreciation to your audience.

I have found this method extremely successful on social media, because the people who I’ve shown my appreciation to the most, by taking my time to thank them personally for their constant support, have become my most loyal followers that have been with me over 3 years now.

Remember that if you take something for granted, it will leave you faster than you know it.

Remember to always be grateful and show that you are genuinely thankful for whatever you should be thankful for.

On social media, there are endless ways to show that you are grateful, but doing something is better than doing nothing. You can give away gifts, coupons, write them a personal message, or thank them publicly in a post of yours.

The more you show that you truly appreciate your audience and the people who are supporting you, the more loyal they’ll become.

People like to feel acknowledged and valued, but if you cannot give that to them, they’ll go somewhere else. In the worst case scenario, that somewhere else is your competitor.

Use positive brand reviews

I’ve already talked briefly about social listening, and this is related to that topic.

Whether you know it or not, people are talking about your brand on social media. Some might be complaining, others might be praising you, and some might be leaving reviews and opinions about your brand.

To identify those, you need to actually listen, and use social listening to do so.

In case you’re unaware, brand reviews an testimonials have a huge marketing power.

The reason is simple. Above, you saw that a lot of people don’t trust brands and their marketing, but since testimonials aren’t created by the brand, they tend to be more trusted than their marketing efforts.

As a result, you want to leverage every positive brand review you receive on social media.

One part of brand reviews on social media is not that hard to identify. People might leave a comment on a post of yours or just send you a private message telling you about their great experience and how happy they are.

Others, on the other hand, might just talk about you in a post without mentioning you, by using your hashtag, or by just @ tagging you. Either way, taking the time to work with social listening will allow you to find these conversations, thank them – or help them solve their problem if its a negative complaint, and leverage the positive reviews you are receiving.

These statistics are quite powerful and speaks quite loudly about the power of brand reviews in marketing:

• 92% of consumers now read online reviews vs. 88% in 2014
• 88% trust reviews as much as personal recommendations
• 88% of online shoppers incorporate reviews into their purchase decision
• Consumers who read reviews on a smartphone are 127% more likely to buy than those who read reviews on desktops

Respond to complaints

Responding to complaints on social media is super important. In fact, it’s not only important on social media but virtually everywhere where your customers are complaining.

The worst thing you can do when receiving a complaint is run away from it. Some brands even delete their complaints on social media in fear that other people will see it and decide not to buy from them, but the problem with this is that the person who left it gets angrier, and, that you  lose a perfectly great opportunity to show people how good you are when it comes to customer service. Just because you have a complaint doesn’t mean people will shy away from buying from you. What people think is interesting is seeing how you deal with complaints and what you do to solve your customers’ problems.

The best solution for customer complaints on social media is responding to them quickly, and showing that you are doing everything in your powers to make things right again.

Responding to customer complaints, no matter if it’s  on social media or through email, is truly an art that needs to be mastered. If you know how to do it well, you can convert disgruntled customers into loyal supporters of your brand, but if you do it poorly, you’ll end up making your customer even angrier, making them tell all their friends about their experience.

Remember that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one negative. As a result, great customer service is crucial for social media success, and, ultimately driving more sales.

What’s more, news of bad customer service reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a good service experience:

This means that you need to put great effort into using social listening and identifying all your angry and disgruntled customers and then quickly take action so that the thing above doesn’t happen.

Keep an eye out for competitors

Chances are, your competitors are on social media.

If they aren’t, they’re not much of competitors, are they?

But when your competitors are using social media, you can learn quite a lot by looking at what they are doing – but also what they aren’t doing.

It is said that you shouldn’t focus too much on other people’s races and that you instead should focus on your own stuff, and that’s completely true. However, every now and then, you should look at your competitors to see what they are doing and if you can learn something from them.

If you are just going to look at them and do nothing about it, you might as well not look at all, however, what you should do is look at what they are doing, extract the best parts, and then do it 10 times better.

Put your customer first

Obviously, nothing new when it comes to business, but people tend to believe that social media is so completely different from everything else, but the truth is that it’s not!

The same business principles apply to social media as they do anywhere else.

As a brand, you need to always be putting your customer first.

Putting the customer first means that you are putting the needs and requirements of a customer ahead of anything and everything else. This means striving to build healthy relationships with your consumers by identifying their needs and providing the best possible experience to its customers.

Why is putting the customer first, you ask?

For one essential reason: in order to succeed, not only on social media but as a business, you need to continuously change and adapt to your customer’s ever-changing needs and wants. If you fail in adapting to what your customer wants and needs, you will lose your customers to competitors who are better at it.

As a result, you need to put the customer first for great customer-retention and customer-loyalty.

Use storytelling

Storytelling has an immense power in marketing.

A common misconception is that fact and figures are what motivates people, but the truth is that those two things are not as near as good as storytelling.

Storytelling is one of the most fundamental ways that we humans communicate ideas. Humans remember stories better than facts, and since stories also normally include emotions, they impact the listener or reader much more than some statistics.

As a result, with the help of great storytelling, you can impact your audience to do something for you, for example, buy from you.

What’s more, social media is an excellent place to tell your stories, so start telling them today, to greater impact your audience and get your message listened to.

Share visual content

Visual content is the foundation to many social media platforms. Because on many of them, you cannot share a post without using visual content.

The best part is that humans resonate far better with visual content than text, and this is a good thing in marketing.

Just look at these numbers:

Makes it quite clear how visual content can be a lot more impactful than plain text, right?

Photos will allow you to convey your message better and grasp your audience’s attention better on social media. It will also allow you to cut through the noise and get more engagement on your post.

Not only should you post visual content, but you should obviously post high-quality visual content.

The competition of getting your audience’s attention is extremely tough, and if the visual content you share is so-so, you just won’t generate very good results.

Tweets that feature images, for example, get 150 percent more retweets, are favorited 89 percent more and generate  18 percent more clicks.

That’s quite remarkable, But if you think about how much better the human brain processes visuals as opposed to text, it’s not very surprising, really. The trick is just taking what you’ve learned here and executing upon it by sharing more high-quality visual content.

Build relationships

As I mentioned earlier, social media is called social for a reason. If you’re not using it for being social and engaging with your audience, you’re missing out on the biggest benefit of them all on social media: building and strengthening the relationships with your audience.

Building relationships with your audience have many benefits.

First off, when you build relationships with your audience you make them more engaged in your brand – both on social media as a whole. As a result, they’ll eventually become more engaged in your brand, which ultimately makes them brand advocates.

When you build relationships with your audience, you increase their trust in you. And as you know, if people don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you! Trust is the single most important key to driving sales.

The best part is that social media is a tremendous place to engage with your audience and strengthen your relationships. First off, a lot of people are already engaging with your brand on social, and all you need to do then is to respond to them! People expect your response, but if they don’t receive it, they’ll go somewhere else. And the natural choice is your competitor.

Therefore, you should respond to every single comment you receive on your posts on social media.

Only a small part of your audience engage with your posts, and this means, in theory, that you’ll be able to build relationships with a small part of your audience. Therefore, you need to encourage engagement and interactions with your audience. Sometimes, people need to be encouraged to engage with you, but the best solution is of course to be the one who takes the first step.

Go to the people who are your target audience and start engaging with them. Like their posts, leave comments on them, or even send them a private message. Don’t expect your audience to take the initiative. If you want to build strong relationships with your audience, you re going to have to be the one who takes initiative.

Choose your platforms

A common misconception that people have is that you should be active on every single social media platform you can come across.s

this is obviously not true.

The idea is that the more platforms you’re active on, the more people you’ll reach, and the better results you’ll generate.

The catch, however, is that when you choose a ton of platforms, you’ll only end up spreading your efforts, and as a result, generate average results on all of them.

The truth is, you are far better off generating amazing results on a few platforms instead of generating average or below average results on many. The reason?

Well first off, your target audience isn’t to be found on every single social media platform there is. For example, if your target audience consists of men, then obviously, you don’t want to be using a platform where the majority of the users are women. This will only result in you wasting your efforts.

Secondly, it is better to build a strong and loyal army of engaged followers rather than a weak and small army.

After all, if they meet, which of these two do you think will win?

The bottom line is that you need to choose social media platform based on your audience, but also on your objectives and what you are hoping to achieve. What’s more, you also need to be choosing a social media platform bas4d on your content strategy. For example, if you are terrible at creating videos, but are an expert at creating amazing videos, then obviously you want to opt for a social media platform that supports your expertise. Since you aren’t very good at creating video, then YouTube isn’t a platform for you.

Instagram, on the other hand, which is almost solely dedicated to photos, will probably be an excellent platform for you!

Be active

I mentioned earlier that you should be posting at least once a day, but that’s just the minimum number according to me. If you look at statistics:

You’ll see the ideal number of posts is higher than one, but one is still more than zero, right?

But being active does not only refer to the number of posts you should share. You can still be active on social media without posting anything.

Social media is not a  marketing source that you just set and forget, because elf you do, you won’t generate any results, and you’ll only end up hurting your brand instead.

Chances are, people will write to you on a regular basis. Some people might turn to you on social media to complain, others might ask a question regarding orders, and others might just want to engage with you.

Either way, you need to engage with those people. They expect responses, and therefore, you need to give it to them.

The truth is that people expect a response from brands on social media within 4 hours, but instead, brands respond within an average of 10 hours.

Can you see the problem with you only logging in once a week, twice a week, etc?

You’ll miss a lot of messages, and a ton of opportunities for building relationships with your audience and ultimately getting them to convert.

People expect prompt responses, and if you don’t give that to t1hem., you know what happens, do you?

Stay positive

Nobody likes a negative person, just like they don’t like a negative brand.

When you are positive, you tend to attract more people because being around a positive person makes yourself more positive and happy.

When engaging with your audience, always encourage them and give them compliments about how good they are. As a brand, you want a community that is positive on social media, not a community that spreads negativity and hate.

And building a positive culture always start with you.

Keep ýour brand consistent across social networks

You’re probably going to be using several social media platforms at ones, and if you do, it is important that you have a consistent brand across them. That way, you make it easier for people to find your brand and to follow you.

Ideally, you should have the same username on all your social media accounts. Because if I am following you on Instagram and your username is Adidas, I’ll obviously search for Adidas if I am looking for your account on Facebook.

Secondly, you want to have the same profile picture on your social media accounts, and preferably, your profile images on social media should be your logo. Because using your logo will help increase brand awareness, and make it easier for people to recognize your account from miles away.

Develop a brand personality

Having a brand personality is important not only for social media but as a business as a whole. It’s also important to point out that your brand personality should be consistent no matter if you’re engaging with your audience on social media, or if they’re calling you.

Having a brand personality, a consistent brand message and brand voice will make your audience resonate better with you, and get to know a personality rather than a stiff and boring brand.

But be careful though. Just because you develop a brand personality doesn’t mean your audience will resonate with it, right?

Of course not!

You need to develop a brand personality based on your target audience and their personality.

For example, if you are targeting men and women who are 50+ year-olds, you should probably not use abbreviations and slang, because that will distance your audience from you, and alienate them.

Together with your brand personality, you also want to develop a visual theme that is consistent. If you, for example, take a look at Coca-Cola’s Instagram feed:

It’s quite clear what color they want you to associate with their brand, right?

When creating your visual theme, you should, therefore, have your own color scheme with the colors you’re mainly going to focus on, filters to use, and so on. WHat’s important is that you share visual content that is cohesive and looks similar to each other. That way, people will eventually be able to recognize your type of content from a mile away.

Know your customers

It’s simply not enough to know your target audience. You have to know your customers.

A great way to get your target audience is to engage with them. When you engage with them, you build your relationship with them and when you build your relationship with them, you get to know them.

It’s all connected!

As you get to know your customers, you need to tailor your social media strategy to better match their preferences.

Remember that people don’t care about you, they care about the value you provide to them. And when you know your target audience, you know what your audience finds valuable, which means that you can tailor your value proposition to perfectly match your target audience.

Provide value

The key to social media success is as I said earlier, content. But it is important that the content is high-quality and provides your audience value.

Therefore, you’re going to use a psychology method called reciprocity.

In fact, this is a method that should be applied to every aspect of a business, but the mindset of selling so completely off that few brands are using it.

Using reciprocity means that you are going to provide your audience with so much value that they eventually feel guilty in repaying the favor. For a brand, this is the ultimate way to drive more sales. Sure it might take some time, but it works, and it is tremendously effective.

Brands today are only about selling, selling, selling, which means take, take, take – without giving.

And people hate that. If you’re in a relationship where one part is only taking and never giving, how long do you think it will last?

Not that long, right?

Most brands on social media are too self-centered and only make it about them, and shoving ads down their followers’ throats. But this gives you a tremendous opportunity to stand out from the crowd and steal ground.

Learn your audience, find out what they see as valuable, and then give it to them.

It’s not more difficult than that!

The common misconception about social media is that you sell more by shoving more ads down your followers’ throats, however, that’s actually false.

Instead, with reciprocity, you actually sell more by promoting less. Or, if you see it from another angle, you promote yourself by bringing value to your audience.

Complete your social profile

In most cases, your social profile is the first thing people will see when they come across your brand. and just like a storefront, it needs to be appealing and inviting.

Make sure you fill out all parts of your profile such as name, website link, bio, location, contacts, and so on. Also, don’t forget to set your logo as your profile picture.

Your handle should ideally be your brand name without any numbers or unnecessary dots and underscores, and your bio should quickly describe your business and your mission.

Be unique

There are billions of accounts on social media, so the only way to stand out is to be original and unique. Your brand personality is an important part of that. Take a look at your competitors and see what you can do that can separate yourself from them. A way to be unique is to simply be better than your competitors at everything you do.

It’s tough and time-consuming but definitely worth it because you can establish yourself as the industry leader and steal competitors from your competitors if you do.

Don’ts of social media marketing

The opposite obviously goes for almost all the points that I’ve listed above, so I won’t go too much into those when talking about the don’ts of social media because you already know that. For example, I wrote that you should engage with your audience, so that obviously means that you should not avoid engaging with your audience, right?

Except for the ones that need further explanation of course.

Don’ be fake

It’s amazing how fake many people on social media are. It’s not that they create a fake account and go around spreading hate and negativity, but instead, they present their lives in the most amazing and flawless way. As you might know, this has been a great subject over the last couple of years because it is so easy to present a lifestyle you want to live on social media and make everyone else jealous.

But the truth is that you’ll be far better off if you’re just you. Be real and don’t try to make your life look more amazing than it is.

This goes especially for influencers and if you’re a brand. It’s not completely uncommon that influencers photoshop their images to make them look more skinny and muscular etc, but the problem with this is that the young people that look up to them believe that that is the way you have to be, and that can have devastating results.

Remember that you are a role model on social media, whether you’re a brand, influencer, or a regular user, so be you, be real, and don’t fake it.

Don’t share sadness

This one is a bit tricky. For influencers that have built a strong relationship with their audience, sharing sadness can be okay and respected. If you’re a brand, on the other hand, sharing sadness isn’t something you can do.

If you’re going to use psychology in your marketing, happiness is the feeling you want to evoke in your audience. By doing so, your audience will get a positive memory of your brand and associate your brand with something positive. But sadness, on the other want, will just do the opposite. And people aren’t on social media to be sad and down.

Don’t believe everything you read

This one is obvious, yet still, tons of people are sharing a bunch of viral content that is obviously fake, and then add their thoughts about it.

When using social media, you should consider everything you see and read with a critical eye. During the presidential election, a lot of fake news was spread that would benefit one or the other party, and this just shows how easy it is to skew the reality

Don’t waste your time

Most of the time, I’d actually say the opposite. Not ”waste your time”, but more so ”take your time”. The thing is, brands and people go into social media with this great ambition about growing 10K, 20K, or even 100K in a few months or year etc. And sure, there’s nothing wrong with that, because it is absolutely possible, depending on which platform you’re going to do it on, however, if your actions don’t back up your goal, then you’re in trouble. You have to realize that social media takes time if you want to generate great results. They just won’t come after one week. Success on social media is reached after consistent and hard work.

But there’s a catch.

The time you put into social media means nothing if you’re doing the wrong things, or if you’re just wasting your time. This goes for everything in business and everything in life!

Sure, you can go to the golf club if you want to become a professional at golf, but unless you put in the effort and actually play, you’ll never become one.

The bottom line?

Going to social media to respond to your customer questions, engaging with your audiences and sharing a post, that’s how you reach success. But ending up having scrolled posts for one hour will obviously not take you closer to where you want to be. Therefore, you need to realize that social media takes time and effort, but if you’re just wasting your time on social media, you’ll never reach success.

Don’t pretend like you know it all

Nobody likes a pundit. The problem, though, is that it is easy to become one on social media. If someone asks you a question, you can just Google it and give people an answer, and pretend like that information was extracted from your Brain. But if you always go around thinking that you’re better than anyone, there’s a risk that you’ll scare away people. Nobody wants to be around someone who feels superior to others.

Note that there’s a difference between being a thought leader on social media and being a know-it-all.

If you’re a thought leader, you show that you are an expert in your own space, but you’re still humble and admit your own flaws. Generally, this is a much better personality to have than pretending like you know it all and have no flaws because if you’re humble and show that you’re not perfect – just like everyone else, you’ll humanize yourself and make yourself much more approachable.

Don’t like your own posts

A small and simple tip! People can see who likes your posts and they’ll think you’re weird and egocentric if they see that you’ve liked your own post. It will just make you seem very desperate.

That one like you get from liking your own post does not make up for the negative effects of liking your own post, so stay away from it.

Never ignore your profiles

This one is crucial to social to success. The truth is that social media success is not reached with a set and forget mentality. It is reached with consistent, hard work.

On social media, you should log in at least once a day, but preferably, more! The thing is, people, turn to your social media page for customer service, to ask questions, to engage, etc, and people expect brands to respond within 4 hours. The problem, however, is that brands, on average, respond within 10 hours.

If you’re just logging in once a day, or less, you’ll miss out on a ton of opportunities to engage with your audience and even to convert people to your customers.

If people don’t receive a response in a timely manner, there’s a great risk that they’ll go somewhere else, such as your competitor.

Realize that social media is always on – 24/7, and that means you need to be too!

Don’t share too much

It’s important to find a balance between how much you’re going to post. Too little means that you’re not taking advantage of the benefits that sharing a social media post has, but sharing too much means spamming your audience and making them mad and unfollow you.

Whenever people ask me how often they should post on social media, I say that it depends. there are a lot of factors that play on, for example, which platform you’re using. Ultimately, how many posts you should share depends on your followers and your audience. Ultimately, they are the ones who are going to see them, right?

But the thing is that that answer is very complicated and technical, and that’s why I then say 1. One post a day is the minimum recommended number of posts you should share daily.

Got it?

Good.

Don’t reveal too much

Remember that the posts you share on social media are out for the world to see. Therefore, you need to be very careful that you’re not revealing too much or showing anything that you should be showing. Mistakes that have happened for brands on social media is that the communication between the different teams has been bad, and as a result, the social media team has shared an announcement, product sneak peak, or a product release when they weren’t supposed to.

Make sure you have a great communication with the rest of your team, and before posting someone, ask everyone if it is okay if you post it.

Don’t engage and connect with everyone

A common misconception many have is that just because someone follows you, you need to follow back. That is obviously not true.

The reason you follow someone is that you like their posts and want to see more of them. If you don’t like their posts and don’t want to see more of their posts, then don’t follow them!

Simple!

This goes for interacting with people as well. If a bot writes to you with their spammy message, you have no obligation to respond to them and waste your time. Make sure you learn to separate between spammy messages and your customers that need a response and act accordingly.

Don’t forget to engage and interact

According to me, this is the single most important part of social media. After all.

Social media is meant to be social, which means that the key pillar is that you should engage and interact with people on social media. And not surprisingly, if you put almost all your effort and focus on doing so, you can generate amazing results.

Why?

Because when you engage with people, you build your relationship with them at the same time as you’re increasing their trust in you. When your audience trusts you more, there’s a much greater chance that they’ll buy from you.

The best part is that by making them engaged on social media, they’ll become loyal advocates of your brand that engages with every single post of yours and promote your brand completely for free just because of how awesome you are.

Networking is key on social media so identify your target audience and start engaging. There are endless of people so that won’t be your biggest problem.

Don’t share something you will regret

Similar to revealing too much, never share something on social media that you will regret. First off, once you post something on social media, it will be out there forever. Sure, you can delete a post, but the real truth is that it will be in the databases of the social media platforms for all eternity. What’s more, if you share something controversial or something people realize that you will remove, they’ll take screenshots of it.

Just look at this influencer marketing post made by Scott Disick where he copied and pasted the caption that they wrote for him. He, of course, deleted the post when he realized, but as you can see, the post still lives on.

Awkward, right?

And definitely not a position you want to be in.

Don’t be spammy

Social media is not a place for spam, and think about it, do you want to build the reputation of not being spammy, then don’t be it.

I often get questions like ”how do I become less spam on social media?” and similar, but the answer is so simple!

Post less spam!

That’s it!

Don’t make every post you share a promotional post and an opportunity for you to shove ads down your audience’s throats.

The truth is that people aren’t on social media because they want to see ads. Instead, they are on social media because they want to get value in one way or another. Some might want information, others news, some might want entertainment, and others inspiration. Don’t share so much promotional content, because the truth is that social media is a lot different than your regular sources of marketing. The more promotional content you share, the better results you won’t get. instead, the more spammy content you’ll post, the more people you’ll scare away.

There are billions of accounts to follow on social media, and if you don’t provide your audience with content that brings them value, they won’t hesitate to go somewhere else.

Don’t ignore comments

I’ve talked quite a lot about engaging and interacting on social media, and this obviously also goes for responding to comments. It’s such a crucial part of engaging with your audience yet, wherever I go on social media, I see brands that aren’t practicing this.

This is to just for small brands with very few resources, but it is also for huge corporate giants with a whole social media team.

It’s amazing, really, because they’re missing out on amazing opportunities.

If you ask me, the biggest benefit of social media is that you can engage and build relationships with people in your target audience, which ultimately leads to them becoming loyal supporters of your brand, but in order to do so, you first need to identify them, and then engage with them and hope they want to interact with you.

But if they have already taken the first step and commented on your post, it’s an open goal!

First, they show that they want to engage with you, secondly, they are clearly interested in your posts and thirdly, they are within your target audience.

Now, they might write a customer service question that needs answering, or, they might just want to engage with you, but no matter what, you should respond.

People who comment on your post don’t expect you not to respond. Why else would they comment?

When someone takes to you, you respond, you don’t look away.

And just because the conversation takes place on social media doesn’t mean that the nature of human interaction is any different.

Don’t delete negative comments

This is crucial, yet, it’s not too seldom that I see brands deleting negative posts. They believe that when someone posts a negative complaint on their social media, it will harm their brand’s reputation, and if nobody saw it, it didn’t happen, right?

Well, completely wrong.

When someone complaints on your social media page, they expect a response. And if you delete their message, you show them that you have absolutely no interest in helping them out and that you are planning to ignore them.

If there’s something that customers hate, it is being ignored. THey’re writing to you because they expect to get help.

Secondly, you shouldn’t see complains on social media as something negative! Instead, you should see it as an opportunity for you to show people what an incredible customer service you have.

The truth is that 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with you again. But on the bright side, if you resolve a complaint in the customer’s favor and they will do business with you again 70% of the time.

What’s more, when you respond to the customer complaint in a good manner, the people who see it will get a positive view on your brand, because they see that you genuinely care and want to make things right.

Don’t automate too much

First off, I have nothing against automation. It saves time and allows social media managers to do other things, however, when it comes to customer interaction, I am completely against it.

I have expressed just how important customer engagement and interaction is, and how it is one of the main benefits of social media. But the thing is that in order for a conversation to be genuine and for it to help you build better relationships with your audience, a human touch is needed. if you don’t have that, your audience will have a hard time resonating with you.

Sure, I have no doubt that in the future, bots will be able to say the perfect thing when engaging with your audience to resonate with them in the best possible way, and to make them as engaged as possible, but for now, we only have a bunch of canned, automated responses that aren’t too effective when it comes to building relationships.

Because people build relationships with humans, not robots.

To make the customer experience better and more genuine, humanize your brand.

Don’t have several social media accounts on the same platform

If you’re  a brand like Adidas, you can pull off several accounts on the same platform, but that is because they have tons of resources to manage their account, which means that just because they have several accounts doesn’t mean they’re spreading themselves thin.

And secondly, they have multiple accounts because they share different things and appeal to different people. Some accounts are dedicated to football, others to running, other to swimming, and so on.

And having several accounts on the same platform allows them to better share content that resonates with their different audiences. But the thing is that giants like Adidas have a huge audience, and naturally, their audience will have different interests, and therefore several accounts are almost necessary.

But unless you’re the sheer size of Adidas, you’re better off having just one account on each social platform.

If you have more, you’ll end up confusing your audience. Plus, it’s a lot of extra effort, double the effort to be exact. And it is better to focus on one and generate amazing results rather than spreading yourself thin and generate average results on both of them.

Don’t be desperate

When a brand is desperate on social media, it is very unattractive. Especially when it comes to engagement. Never beg your audience to like your post or retweet your tweet. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with asking people to engage every now and then, but if you’re going to do it, do it smoothly, and absolutely don’t beg.

Avoid poor grammar and spelling errors

This goes for if you’re trying to reach and resonate with your target audience that consists of teens who regularly make spelling errors.

On social media spelling and grammar errors are highly unattractive, and it doesn’t matter who your target audience is.

It harms your reputation and makes it seem like you just don’t care. And if you don’t care about spelling, what more don’t you care about? It’s the details that truly matter.

Spelling and grammar errors seriously harm your credibility so make sure you read through everything you write carefully, and then ask someone else to read it through as well!

Apart from what some think, these kinds of errors are never beneficial for your brand.

Don’t write in caps lock

It’s never good to write in caps lock. Doing so will make it seem like you are super upset and angry.

First off, reading caps lock is actually not that pleasant for the eyes of your audiences And secondly, it makes you seem aggressive. Remember that no-one wants to be around someone who is aggressive.

Don’t spam-use hashtags or misuse them

Hashtags are great on platforms like Instagram on Twitter. On platforms like Facebook, they virtually have no power in increasing your engagement or boosting your reach.

If you’re going to use hashtags, make sure you do it strategically and use the hashtags that are related to your industry and niche. A huge mistake you can make is to write your whole caption in hashtags, for example ”#Our #new #jacket #model #is #finally #released #buy #it #today”

First off, doing so makes your post look incredibly spammy which ultimately will make a lot of people scroll past it. Secondly,f you are going to use hashtags, you need to use them strategically and be wise in the hashtags you choose. If you are in the skiing industry, then using a hashtag such as #loveskiing will most likely allow you to reach people who have an interest in skiing, in other words, your target audience.

However, as you saw in my example, I used words like #it, #finally, and so on. Who do you think searches for those?

Not people in your target audience, that’s who!

Don’t share repetitive posts

There’s nothing wrong with reposting a post that you shared a year ago, or half a year ago, because chances are, a lot of your followers will be new and therefore never have seen your old posts. As long as your old posts bring value to your audience, there’s nothing wrong with sharing them-

The problem is when you repost every single post that you shared a week ago, and repost the same post over and over again. Humans have a very bad attention span, and if you’re just sharing the same content over and over, quite soon people will lose interest and go somewhere else.

Don’t send automated Direct Messages

Some people have automated direct messages when someone follows them on social media.

Obviously, people know that they are automated because they’re super stiff and boring, and most people who receive it will not be positively impacted, but more so, they’ll start seeing you as a spammer.

Don’t leave your social media profiles incomplete

Your social media profile is most likely the first thing people will see when coming across your brand on social media, and obviously you want t make it look as appealing as possible. Because it can be the difference between a follow and an abandoned page.

Therefore, when setting up your page, make sure you complete all parts of it. Fill in your contact information, including your website, write an appealing and attention-grabbing bio that describes what you do.

Don’t only make it about you

It’s easy to become self-centered on social media, especially if you are an influencer who post selfies all day long.

When you only make it about you, there’s a risk that you’ll eventually bore your followers to death. Talk about things that interests and appeal your audience, and talk about subjects that they have a genuine interest in. Chances are, that they are interested in the niche you’re in, just not hearing about your brand all day long.

Don’t ignore complaints or criticism

As I mentioned earlier, the worst thing you can do is delete complaints on social media.

But something that’s also a bad idea to do is to ignore the complaints and criticism you receive. Remember that people who write to you expect a response back. What’s more, don’t take complaints and criticism as something negative. Look at it with neutral eyes and try to understand if what they re saying actually holds any real value and truth- If it does, then try to act accordingly and solve the problem that they have helped you identify.

If people are giving you feedback about how to improve, it is obviously because they hare about your business and want to see you succeed.

Don’t only focus on follower count

This is a mistake that I see many brands and people make on social media.

The truth is that it is not only follower cunt that matters for social media success.

Sure, follower count is a very clear metric that can indicate popularity, but it doesn’t have to be that. In fact, if you want, you can just buy a few thousand followers for few dollars, but you’ll only get fake followers who will never do anything to your brand. What truly matters is the number of engaged people you can accumulate as your followers, how many people who are genuinely interested in your brand that engage with you on a  regular basis.

Remember:

Social media followers mean nothing unless they’re engaged.

Don’t spread yourself too thin

A part of this is creating multiple accounts on the same platform, as I talked about earlier, but another part of this is using too many social media platforms at once.

The truth is that you’ll be far better off focusing on a few platforms rather than spreading your efforts across a bunch of social media platform, but a misconception is that the more platforms you’re on, the better results you’ll generate.

Instead of spreading yourself thin, look at the demographics of the different platforms and try to identify where the majority of your audience spends their time.

That way, you’ll make sure you are using the platforms where you have the biggest chance of reaching your audience.

Don’t mix business with personal

Business and your personal life are two things that should be kept separate. Unless you’re an influence, people don’t want to see what you are doing in your free time.

For brands, people want to see what your team is doing and what is happening behind the scenes. They don’t want to see what one employee is doing after work hours.

If you want to post both contents from your personal life but also from your business, it is better to have two separate accounts.

Don’t forget about your reputation

Reputation is greatly important on social media , and if you’re struck by a social media storm, you can harm your reputation significantly. On the contrary, social media can help you build your reputation, so it’s like a double-edged sword that you have to handle with care.

Use social listening to understand what your customers are saying about you and then act accordingly. If you notice that a lot of people are complaining, address the thing they’re complaining about and hoop into the conversation and let people know that you are listening and that you are doing everything you can to solve it.

Conclusion

Social media can generate amazing marketing results for your brand, but a precondition for doing so is being able to use it in the right way.

A hammer is worthless if you don’t use it. A screwdriver doesn’t help if you’re using it the other way around.

The key to driving great results on social, is therefore, knowing the do’s and dont’s of social media marketing so you can both avoid doing the things that harm you, but also do the things that are beneficial. did you find any point extra interesting?

If so, let me know in the comment section below!