How to annoy your social media followers. Sounds an odd title for a blog or podcast, doesn’t it? Well, don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind on this – I’m giving you some great examples of how to annoy your followers so you can do the opposite. And please do. We all work so hard to grow our social media followers and nurture an audience, and if we then annoy them… well, what’s the point? So, here I’m giving you some ways to annoy your followers, so you can do the opposite.
How to annoy your social media followers… eight ways…
So I said above, today’s podcast is all about how to annoy your social media followers. Here are eight ways to do it (so you can avoid it…)
- Blank them. Yes, you craft a post, you edit the image, the caption is perfection… people comment… and then you don’t respond. At all. It’s like going somewhere to see people and asking them questions, and when those people do what you want (come and see you and answer), you blank them. Why would people keep coming back for more?! Exactly. Some of the best accounts out there – and I mean really big ones – engage. Even if they set themselves 20 minutes to engage after they have posted, they do. And putting that effort into engaging with followers is the way to keep them engaged and interested.
- Be inconsistent. If you want people to ‘invest’ in you, your social media, and your following, you need to show up consistently. People get bored and lose interest when you’re scatty. And there’s no need. When you post in real time, it can be a real tie, but of you schedule you can address this issue. I use Later for Instagram, and I use Smarterqueue and Facebook’s in built scheduler to do this.
- Rubbish content. And by rubbish content I mean bad images (blurry for no good reason, images that make no sense at all, etc), badly thought through captions. The images are the thing that will make someone double tap or move on. So make sure your images are good. Put time into learning how to take better images, work with a pro photographer if you want to. When it comes to captions, make sure there’s a point to the captions you write and do you very best to limit the spelling and grammatical errors.
- Making people work hard. People don’t want to work hard to understand what’s going on in the image, or jump through a million hoops to get to the point of it. One really good example is competitions. If you’re running a competition on social media always keep it as simple as possible and inside the rules. If you make the competition easy to enter and they don’t have to work really hard to enter, it’ll do better. Don’t overcomplicate. Have key objectives.
- Be cryptic. I have absolute no patience for cryptic posts. Say it or don’t. We’re all busy enough.
- Be egotistical. And I don’t mean don’t share pictures of yourself. Please do this. But it’s really the caption here. If every post is all about how amazing and exceptional you are, it won’t win you any fans or actually help your fans in any way. If you’re telling a story around the image it’s hugely positive. Just saying ‘LOOK I’M AMAZING’ is not good. It’s not storytelling or sharing. I’m not talking about sharing a win – that’s great to share. It’s a very different thing.
- Using the wrong people to run your account. Many businesses use social media managers to help them with their accounts (and I’m not being negative here – I work on a number of social media accounts for brands!), but make sure they’re the right people. When working with niches, like equestrian business, it’s important that the person running your accounts is, for example, horsey. Otherwise you’ll turn your followers off.
- SPAM comments. Please don’t leave spam comments on people’s posts. Use your time to actually engage if that’s what you’re doing. Putting time into reaching out and connecting is a really big deal and can be so positive, but make sure they’re good, genuine, authentic comments that mean something.
So there you go – eight ways to annoy your social media followers. As I said, a lot of these are really obvious, but some might not to. And the great thing is that with all of the above, it’s just little tweaks we can make. Growing a social media following, a true authentic and engaged one, takes time. And to help accelerate this process we can make micro adjustments to make sure we’re really doing the very best we can by our followers. And, in turn, our account. And the above should really help that.
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