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The Wrong Way to Use Social Media
Let me take a moment to voice a pet peeve of mine.
Social media is intended to help build social relationships. It's not intended to be used as a bludgeon to mindlessly blurt out your message over and over and over without any regard for the listeners. Let me point out two of the most aggregious offenses:
Facebook has allowed companies to create company pages which allows you to share information about your firm. Links, status updates, articles, pictures, events...all sorts of stuff. It's really quite good. We have a company page ourselves. And with Facebook you can quickly send out an invitation to all of your Facebook friends, asking them to "Like" your page. So far, so good.
The problem is overzealous marketers who blast out the "Like Our Page" invites to their friends list each and every week. That's the luge ride to getting unfriended by me. Got a company page and want to invite me to "Like" it? That's great! I'm happy to take a look at it. Maybe I'll "Like" it and maybe I won't. Usually I make that decision based upon whether I find your Company page interesting and/or informative. I get a LOT of "Like" requests and I simply can't "Like" all of them. I consider my "Liking" a page to be an endorsement of that page, so if I really don't like your page or don't find it interesting or relevent...I'm not going to endorse it. Nothing personal.
Did you make some changes to your company page and want to RE-invite me to like it - give it another look? O.K. I'll take another look.
But if you invite me every single week...now you're just being annoying. I didn't like your page last week, the week before or the week before that. I guarantee you I don't like it now. And you just got unfriended. (unless you're an actual personal friend of mine, in which case you'll get a gently chiding e-mail asking you to knock it off)
We DO send invites to friends to "Like" our company page. Once a year. Usually in October around our company anniversary. That's it. If you didn't "like" our page last October...you won't get asked again until next October. Maybe November. We send out the invites simply to remind our friends that the page exists, or to point the page out to new friends we may have gained since last year.
Some folks take a similar approach in Twitter. They blast out a daily (or even hourly!) tweet that is nothing but an SEO (search engine optimization) link to their site. It's noise. It's spam. Worse is when they append unrelated hash tags (like #bieber) just to get more page views.
I have a Twitter account. You can find me tweeting at @bschorr. I try to only post or retweet things that are actually interesting and have some actual content. A few times a week I may suggest a book or tool that I find a good deal on at Amazon.com. I may occasionally post a link to a blog entry or article that I think people may find interesting. I do occasionally allow Yelp to post my check-ins to Twitter - generally when I'm having lunch or dinner somewhere in town and I'm o.k. with having clients or colleagues in the area stop by to say "Hello" and have a cup of coffee with me.
I do NOT auto-tweet the same post over and over and over again just for search engine hits.
And you shouldn't either.