How many times have you found an interesting brand only to look up the company on social media and be less than impressed with what you see? While we are all aware that social media is a must-have for companies in 2018, businesses are still trying to figure out how to use it to their advantage.
With 58% of social media users following brands on their accounts, learning the dos and don’ts of these platforms is imperative to creating a positive customer experience. Not quite sure what those “don’ts” entail? Let’s take a closer look at 5 of the most common bad social media habits brands should break.

1. Recycling Content

When posting the perfect photo to Instagram, the “share to all platforms” button can be tempting, but don’t fall into its trap. This tactic comes off as lazy and is ineffective for a number of reasons: if you are posting the same content across all platforms, why would anyone bother to follow you on each? Additionally, one of the great characteristics of social media is that different platforms tend to come with different audiences. Staying active on multiple platforms gives you the opportunity to cater your content and tone to each.

2. Over-Selling

Yes, social media can be a great tool for driving traffic and making sales, but that’s not all it is good for. Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? For social media, this means that 80% of your content should be helpful and promote relationships between you and your followers while only 20% should be promotional. Try breaking up sales posts with a fun fact about your industry, behind-the-scenes of your corporate culture, or even a cool blog post!

3. An Unreliable Content Schedule

While you don’t want to spam followers with constant updates and retweets, you don’t want to ghost them for weeks at a time either. Making a reliable content schedule is key to finding a happy medium. There is no magic number for how many times you should post, some brands enjoy posting once or more a day while others prefer a few great posts a week. Find what works best for your company and stick with it. Your followers should know when to expect to hear from you.

4. Disregarding Visuals

Did you know that visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media? Text-only posts are far more likely to fall victim to the scroll button because they do not offer anything eye-catching or attractive. They will rarely succeed at holding your followers’ attention and all of the time that went into crafting the perfect Facebook status or witty tweet will have been lost. Check out @BIGfishPR for examples on how to incorporate visuals into everyday content.

5. Poor Hashtag Use

Hashtagging can be an extremely valuable tool if used correctly. But using 10 hashtags in a post with 18 words probably means you have gone overboard. Hashtags are most effective when they are used to highlight keywords in your content so that it is easily searchable. Hashtagging every other word just looks messy and is difficult to read. A good rule of thumb is to stick to under 5 hashtags per post.
In short, social media can be a powerful tool for your company and as Spiderman knows, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Taking the time to break your bad social media habits and reading up on best practices will guarantee visible results in quality of followers. What’s the most annoying social media habit you’ve seen? Let us know and be sure to follow us on Twitter for more PR insight @BIGfishPR!