5 Deadly Social Media Mistakes to Avoid

5 Deadly Social Media Mistakes to Avoid

Understanding what NOT to do when it comes to social media is nearly as important as knowing what you should do. Here are several social media mistakes to avoid at all costs!

Jokes in poor taste – It should be obvious, but you need to put on your thinking cap before you tweet, update or post. And above all, don't try and take advantage of someone else’s misfortune as a way to promote your products or services. While a celebrity death or embarrassment may seem like easy pickings for trending traffic, you can actually end up alienating more people than you attract!

Offending your customers – Right up there with poor taste humor is the tendency to state your preferences, political, social or otherwise, that may or may not correspond with those of your clients and customers. Use your head! Don’t write about anything with the general public that might cause offense or be misconstrued, or you’ll pay big for this transgression.

Failing to separate your business and personal accounts – Not to mention that it appears much more professional to make a company profile and page, often times there are benefits (depending on the social network) for a purely company account. This is certainly true with Google Local. A public business account is usually more likely to be seen in the search engine results.

Not using social media buttons on your site – These are very easy to make use of, and available for all social media platforms. You’re basically throwing traffic away if you don’t make use of these simple tools to extend your reach by making them available for your homepage and all the content you create, for example a Panic Away Review or some like that. This is extremely easy to do.

Not using your social media profiles to link back to your site – You’ve gone to all the bother to build and use these social sites, why not take the free, authoritative link they’re offering back to you! Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google all permit you to link back to your website. There’s five great links to your site, and a great opportunity for your (hopefully) many followers to end up on your site.