Ten Sure-Fire Ways to Social Media Failure

1. Don’t have a purpose. If you’re using social media for your business, you’re doing it because everyone else is. Don’t have a goal in
   mind and don’t use it to help you choose the most appropriate channels or measure the results.
2. Don’t fill out your social media profile completely. Most social media sites allow you to add information about yourself so that other members will know what you’re all about. The less information about you, your business and what makes it special you post in your profile the better. You don’t want other people looking at the information and deciding to do business with you.
3. Don’t include your website in your profile. When you converse with people online, they may want to know more about you and your company. One of the things they’re going to want to look at is your website, so don’t include its address. In fact, don’t bother having a website at all!
4. Tweet the same self-promotional tweet dozens of times. Why not sound like parrot who has only learned a single phrase? Why should you make an effort to be interesting?
5. Apologise in advance. Warn your followers about updates or messages you’re about to make. Make sure that if they don’t want to see your communication they can switch off or stop following you. If you apologise in advance those who don’t want the information won’t be annoyed, because you warned them, didn’t you?
6. Repeatedly misspell words. Don’t type your updates in a word processing program and spell check them before you post to your social network. After all, who cares?
7. Mix business and personal accounts. If your business followers don’t want to know that little Selwyn is progressing nicely with his potty training, or that you just cleaned out your sock drawer, they probably don’t value their relationship with you, do they?
8. Have a very unprofessional personal presence. Someone who’s interested in your home-care service searches for your personal name on the web and lands on your Facebook page showing you laying down on the sofa with a beer bottle in your hand, they’ll understand.
9. Spam multiple groups with the same, self-serving “important” reminder. Home owners want to know about certain safety products for their homes. So post about those safety products in the business development LinkedIn group they belong to. Make sure that your off-topic messages are poorly disguised pitches for products or services you sell.
10. Stuff tweets with hash tags. You’ve got 140 characters, so why not cram in as many hash tags as you can to ensure your sales message is found by everyone? In fact, why not express your sales message in as many hash tags as you can?