Followers Hate When Brands Do These Things on Social Media

You wake up, roll over to your nightstand and grab your phone. Immediately, you start scrolling through all of your social media to see what you’ve missed while you were asleep. You see a few eye-catching posts that you give a generous like, share, or comment. However, you also see a bunch of content that you don’t even take a split second to look at. What is it that followers hate that brands do on social media?

Too Many Hashtags and Emojis

Placing dozens of hashtags and emojis in your posts can come across as cluttered and juvenile. When posting content, it is important to use hashtags and emojis sparingly and effectively. Pick a few important ones, rather than a bunch of semi-related ones. For example, if a lot of hashtags are necessary in an Instagram post, share the image with a hashtag-less caption, then place all the hashtags in a comment below. The post still achieves its SEO without the clutter of 16 blue hashtags.

Bad Customer Support

When a customer is unsatisfied with a brand’s service or product, that customer may reach out via social media. When a brand does not respond, it leaves a bad impression. Comments, good or bad, need to be responded to appropriately and positively. Good customer support can demonstrate that your brand likes to engage with its audience and puts customer satisfaction as a top priority.

Too Much Self-Promotion

Followers hate when a brand only uses social media to promote themselves. Brands that engage with their audience (create polls, hold contests, show behind the scenes, introduce their employees to followers, ask questions, and generally act more like a person than a business) are more well-liked by followers.

Typos

When a brand makes a typo or grammatical error, the brand comes across as uneducated or careless about what they post on social media. Make sure to double check or have multiple people revise a post before it goes live on social media. If a spelling or grammatical mistake is made, go back and edit the post as quickly as possible, if possible.

Inconsistent Posting

Do you ever hop on Twitter and scroll through 27 tweets in a row from one brand and just feel overwhelmed? Or do you ever hop on Instagram wondering when your favorite brand will post a new image, or if they’ve disappeared from social media? Brands need to make sure they are posting content consistently across all platforms. Set a standard for your brand for each platform (i.e., we need to post to Instagram once a day, Twitter 5 times a day, and Facebook twice per day). You can use content calendars to help your brand stay organized when dealing with planning across multiple media channels. (See our blog post on tips for creating a content calendar)

As a business or brand, it is tempting to utilize social media for exposure purposes. However, taking a more personal approach to social media can gain a lot more positive attention than simply making sure your accounts are optimized and getting enough views. Views and impressions are important, but actually engaging with the audience on a more personal level can benefit your brand more than you can imagine. A recent example of us doing this at ocreations, was when we shared a video from Saturday Night Live about typography on Facebook and Twitter. The content is relevant to our field, so it appeals to our audience, but the fact that this video is humorous and comes from Saturday Night Live also creates a more personal relationship between our brand and our audience. Think about what brands you like – do they pass the social media follower “likeability” test?