In this excerpt from his new book UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. author Scott Stratten shows the profane acts users of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn commit. How many are you guilty of?
Social Media is so new that most people are making it up as they go,1 but most people seem to make the same mistakes. Or dare I say sins. . . . We look at the biggest players online for business--Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn--but the same concepts can be applied to any social media site.
Greed
Greed is quite a popular sin. Twitter by default is a self-centered tool. It's about us. But it's 100 times better if used as a conversational tool versus a dictation. I see people using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed for their blog or an ad-puker. So absent of personality, I wonder why they even try. Yes, they are in business, but if they believe that business is built on relationships, they need to make building them their business.
This sin holds a special place for the people who only retweet compliments about themselves. I was talking to a colleague of mine and she was asking how I have built such a large amount of followers. I mentioned that I get retweeted a lot and I retweet others. Her reply was "I retweet others all the time!" When I checked out her page, the only time she ever retweeted anyone was if it was a compliment about her or a #FollowFriday2 mention with her in it. You may as well tweet while looking in a mirror telling yourself you're good enough, you're smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you.
Facebook is in a world of its own. Posting on someone's wall with a seven-line signature, mass-inviting people to every event (even if the event is local and the person is not even in the same country), to tagging people in articles that they are not even mentioned in just to get them to read it. There is a special vein in my forehead that you can clearly see when these things occur.
Someone didn't become your friend on Facebook to give you business or to allow you to use his or her wall as a billboard. Even the term "friend" means a relationship, and you are not building one when you invite me to your Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) event in San Diego and I live in Toronto. Instead, use Facebook to engage, and to comment on people's posts and status updates and to share links with them that they may like, not ones you have written to promote yourself but ones you have found that may help them.
LinkedIn falls under the same issues that Facebook does. The group's function has so much great potential because the site is fully business-oriented, yet the majority of the groups and posts that I have seen during my research were either outright spam or drive-by articles. Drive-by articles are those that are posted in multiple groups and sites, which are mostly a thinly veiled pitch for the author's services. Some gurus also teach this method, but you will notice that the original authors are never around when someone has a follow-up question. I hope that the LinkedIn discussion groups become just that, groups that have great discussion.
Gluttony
Get followers fast!!!! Most people on Twitter have seen tweets like this or thought of using a site that helps kick-start things for you. Seems innocent, right? Let's just have a look-see at this logic. Imagine a guy just followed you. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy that a new person is along for the Twitter journey with you, makes up for your lack of popularity in high school, and the day is getting better. Then you go to his profile and you see a bunch of tweets that say:
"I have found a way to get thousands of followers fast and automated!! Go to this site!"
How does that make you feel now? Still warm and fuzzy? Still getting tingles? Didn't think so. When you tweet out "follower system" tweets it says one thing: You're in it for the numbers. I'll bet the 3 cents I still have after my latest trip to Vegas that one of the next tweets will be about an "amazing business." Everything you tweet is an extension of your biz and your brand. If you want to scream about "getting thousands of followers," be my guest, but the funniest part about the above tweet? The actual guy has 149 followers. Seriously.
On Facebook, gluttony takes a different turn for me. While actually writing this book a service provider that I am "friends" with sent me an invite to a Facebook event called "Freedom from the Fat Trap!!!" Really? One of two things happened here. She either sent the invitation, which wasn't even for her own event, to her entire friend list or specifically chose to invite me to the event. I am going to go ahead and guess that it is the former and that I also do not have to tell you how badly somebody could take this. It is about as bad as inviting somebody to an event called "You're Ugly and Here Is How You Can Look a Little Less Ugly." Remember that everything you do impacts your business image, including inviting people to fat camp.
Sloth
Twitter is a conversation. It's truly what I love about it. But imagine having a conversation in person with someone where that person takes an hour to reply to you, face-to-face. How awkward would that be: "Hey, how's business?" and they blankly stare off for an hour, then reply "Good thanks!" That's how it feels if someone takes a week to reply to a tweet. I once had someone who took 79 days to reply to a question that I asked her on Twitter. Seventy-nine days! If it takes you longer to reply than it would to walk over a handwritten reply to my home, you're doing it wrong. I know, not everyone is a tweetaholic like me, and not everyone can devote a good chunk of their day to Twitter. So if you have a limited amount of resources or time, let's say five hours a week, it's better to spend 45 minutes a day for the entire week, than five hours once a week. Consistency breeds familiarity, which creates relationships.
