We recently read a witty and informative blog by Daniel Zeevi titled “11 Things you need to Immediately Stop Doing on Facebook.” In his article, Zeevi pokes fun at the different faux pas and mistakes that people commit on Facebook. Jokes aside, the mistakes he lists could have serious repercussions on your social media goals and greatly limit your audience reach.

  • Do not tag everyone you know simply because you assume that your post will be exposed to a larger network and in turn receive more views. People will not appreciate it if you start using their Facebook wall as your own personal billboard.
  • Do not shower your posts with hashtags, regardless of how interesting you believe your hashtags to be, a paragraph of hashtags is not professional. Make sure your hashtags are short, crisp and make sense.
  • Do not send your friends a message asking them to like your page simply as a favor to you. The whole concept behind liking a page is that you actually agree with the concept it embodies or the services it provides. Do not ask people to like something without providing an explanation of why you believe they should, what the page entails and why you think they may like it.
  • Stop calling for favours of “please like my page and I’ll like yours back!” It’s a little childish.
  • Cross-linking Facebook and Twitter. If you use this functionality, make sure that your posts on either platform work on the other. More specifically, ensure that your posts on Facebook aren’t so long that they will get cut off when they are automatically posted to Twitter.
  • When you send event invites, make sure you are extending the invitation to those who can actually attend your event. This means only invite those who are at reasonable geographical vicinity from the event location. It is annoying to receive an invitation to an event that is located on the other side of the world simply because the person who sent out the mass invites did not bother to check where people reside.

Try and avoid making the mistakes discussed above by constantly following the social media trends and reading the latest articles and blog posts on the topic. Keep in mind that social media is a growing and vibrant field that is constantly facing change and development. What may be an acceptable practice today may be frowned upon tomorrow. In the meantime, if you aren’t an expert in social media, you might want to leave it to the professionals.