6 Social Media Tactics You Must Stop Using

Social media managers could be bracketed as lunatic if they percept the similar piece of information is a worthy hack all the time.

Do you think social media practice with the same, old cookie cutter tactics used during Mark Zuckerberg institution days would be effective today? “Possibly not.”

Even though social media campaigns are gaining desirable success, social media experts keep running them in a similar manner.

Reason? Most of the managers are either lazy or ignore the importance of new script or blindly trust “best practices” that I suspect.

Stop doing this! Before you get penalized.

Do you need help? I am here.

Before you start investing time in productive strategies and tactics, better to not to waste time on even looking upon unproductive ones.

So here are 6 strategically driven tactics for you that you should stop following right now:

1) Only Posting Your Own Content Links

We all know numerous popular social media accounts comprise links to their contents and that would be all or most of them.

Now, you shouldn’t hesitate to share links to your own content.

Remember, it’s your creation and that would definitely be praiseworthy and your followers would be the people who are interested in it. However, in case of using too many links for your own content, you might lead readers to lose interest. Accordingly, they might end up unfollowing you.

Try to keep your followers attracted and engaged with noticeably potential and helpful contents.

No one purposely signs up for promoting.

What to Do?

Use links that include posts with information helpful and of general interest to your audience.

It should be perfectly balanced including shares of content from other non-competitive resources too. Try to be helpful with your content, not promotional.

Add posts which are not linked anywhere else, but are helpful and useful all by themselves.

For instance, posts with short tips or valuable insights.

You can also post a conversation pertinent to your business and audience and this could be especially imperative for Facebook.

This is why FB has the news feed algorithm which strongly favors posts having meaningful interactions among your followers.

2) Jumping Immediately from Follow to Pitch?

You come to find someone in social network loop who is really interesting and few of your friends are already connected with the person.

So, when you hit “follow”, your inbox immediately responds with “ding” sound.

There is the end and…pitch!

Stop doing it!

What’s wrong here?

Such automated pitch messages sent immediately after following is taken as cold and impersonal act.

It makes the person feel that he or she is a prospect to you nothing else.

Better to understand this in the following way-

“Suppose you invited a neighbor over to a dinner party and he started selling his business cards to all your guests.

What would be the impression of your neighbor on your guests?

That’s exactly the same feeling when you receive an immediate pitch message after following someone.

What to Do?

• Use social media for making relationships rather than selling.
• Make a list of new followers to get actual engagement from your side before thinking of sending a direct message.

Check out this list regularly and like some posts every day and better to add meaningful comments wherever you can.

• You should aim at turning cold followers into warm ones.

It is so because when you send a direct message, you don’t sound rude.

3) Mass Following to Gain Followers

A common or general practice going on Twitter and Instagram is Mass Following.

It allows you to gain huge numbers of followers in return. It is so because a lot of social media users start following them who follow them. Thus, it helps mass-followers to escalate their numbers of followers.

They almost have an equal ratio of followers-to-following or even hundreds or thousands of followers, minimum engagement-per-post.

What’s wrong to follow this tactic when it obviously works?

At least two things:

• Users of social media are more cautious to follow fake or low-valued accounts.
• Many are aware that a near-equal ratio of followers-to-following is a hint that user didn’t follow them due to genuine interest.

Your feed will be almost worthless to you. Because you mass-followed accounts with lesser regard for their genuine value.

Your feed will completely be full of junk or include useless posts.

I doubt that most people who mass follow give little time in their feeds. This is the reason to not be followed.

What to Do?

In this post, I will provide ways to grow you’re following and that could be potential ones. It will also help you in building your business and repo.

4) Use of Auto-Engagement Bots

Auto-engagement bots automatically likes or reshares posts of followed accounts.

Alike auto-following tactics given above, the aim here is to generate fake interests in order to increase your visibility.

It also aims at getting the similar engagement back from them.

Accounts utilizing auto-engagement box are not hard to find.

There are scenes of the active following, one is following another 24/7 and it looks like he does nothing except keeping eyes of the person he is following.

Here are the vital reasons this needs not to happen:

• It wrecks your own feed as numerous social networks utilize engagement signals in their algorithm to determine what you see in your feed.

If you are engaged with everything, the algorithm has nothing to go on.

• When you miss the opportunities which come from looking at the posts available in your feed and also taking part in valuable conversations helps in building your impact and opportunities.

What to do?

I advise for real engagement. It may take time and you will have to be in your feed consistently giving time in reading interesting posts, likes, and shares truly worthwhile.

• If it becomes hard for you to find or justify at that time, question yourself why you are in the first place on social media and what would you be getting from it.

If the elementary advantage is the influence, reputation and relationships you will get, you still think engagement-botting will gain you those?

• Create ways you can be more effective at finding posts worth engaging.

On Twitter, make lists of most worthy people you follow and segregate them as per feed for engagement.

5) Inspiring from “Best Times to Post” Studies

I would like to say immediately that it would never be wrong to post when the most people following you are online and thus more likely to view your posts immediately.

But, the issue with “best time to posts” studies is quite easy- they are calculated on averages.

That is, they prominently look at most of the users and their average active social media engagement time and allow you to follow.

The analysis has a flaw and that is an assumption that your following is “average”.

Now, definitely, only “above average” users would follow you, but here I am not talking about that.

What I am trying to say, your analysis of “average” won’t guarantee that a huge number of different accounts matches your specific audience.

The results of such analysis majorly fall into a classic bell curve.

The valuable aspect of the curve is the hours when maximum people in the sample group are online in the network at the same time.

As the survey wasn’t conducted employing your unique audience, it can’t be assured that the best times are actually your best times.

What to do?

Check if your social media tools appear when your audiences are online.

• FB Insights display this for Pages.
• Followerwonk like tools enables you to exhibit active hours for Twitter followers.
• I suggest you run your own test by scheduling posts on a network for diverse times and on different weekdays.

This will help you in finding patterns of your post engagement.

It’s completely true that a tweet reaches to your entire followers the moment you post it and immediately loses visibility unless it gets valuable engagement.

On other social networks, your post reaches to a small subset of your following when it is posted.

Then algorithm starts deciding whether or not it could be valuable for other users in your network and drops it out to them.

6) Not Optimizing Your Content for Sharing

Most of the content writers know how to write SEO-friendly contents, but few of them have the ability to optimize contents for social sharing.

When posted on the blog of Mark Schaefer, Steve Rayson showed that in numerous verticals social sharing has gone down with the rise in the amount of available content.

This means your content vies on a roulette wheel with far fewer shares than there used to be.

The good thing is that if your content is easy to share, it will be shared without hindrances and if better-looking, visually appealing then it is easier to be preferred than a search engine optimized content.

What to do?

• Explore the networks on which your audience remains active most of the time and shows sharing button only on that network.

When you are making social sharing contents, make sure it’s precise and easy to understand. Keep your sharing buttons to only three-to-four at the most.

If your content has social share buttons at the top, it could be helpful. The hard truth is that contents are shared without being read.

A social sharing button vendor Add showed that adding share buttons at the top makes it easiest to be found or shared.

• Use significant quotes and click-to-tweet pullouts so that users can tweet out with one click.
• You can make it with the help of plugins.

Using Open Graph tagging helps you to control the look of the content that would include the URL, the share text, and the shared image.

Major social networks focus on OG tags. If you don’t have this, your content shares might not be the similar you want them to be represented in social feeds.

If you want to know more, hit me up on Twitter!!!