Nowadays, everyone with a Facebook page seems to be a social media specialist. If you take a look at groups for beginners and you do know what social media is all about you will be surprised to see how much bad advice is offered.

The truth is that social media is not as difficult as some may want you to think but this does not mean it is easy and all you really have to do is trust advice from the first person you find. Most people are going to offer you horrible advice about social media. If you trust that advice you will basically shoot yourself in the foot and your growth will be limited.

So much bad advice can be highlighted and I decided to stick to just some that I often see and that a lot of people end up trusting. Every headline below is horrible advice and I will explain why.

Social Media Is The New SEO

The idea that social media replaces SEO is hilarious since they are two different things, 2 marketing tools that you should both use. SEO can draw traffic to social profiles, social posts and sites. Social media helps to improve SEO rankings. These two go hand in hand and one should never be seen as a replacement for the other.

Create Accounts On All The Networks

The idea behind this advice is that you would get more traffic from all the social media networks out there. This is not the case because of various reasons. What you should know is that your audience is not present on all networks so when you work hard on all that you can find you are losing time while wasting a lot of potential. When you start I recommend you focus on 3 networks: Facebook, Twitter and a third one of your choice based on what works best for your industry. For instance, Instagram can be a consideration in Beauty.

Use As Many Hashtags As Possible

Using a hashtag means that you are becoming a part of a conversation but using it correctly is not all about adding as many as you can. As you use too many hastags you automatically lower the quality of your message. People will notice and your results will be bad. While there are different recommendations that can be given for different social networks, the idea is to use the best tags. Start with a maximum of 3 that are HIGHLY relevant for your post, not for your industry.

Automate Posting To Save Time

Automation needs to be used in moderation in order to get the best possible results. For instance, planning posts for most of the week is a good idea. Automatically posting every blog post to the Facebook page through a plugin is not. Automated posting normally leads to sharing content with the same snippets and this is the least of your worries. Also, it is easy to miss out on wonderful opportunities as you are only interested in automating posting and can easily miss out on engagement.

Use Your Social Media Page Solely For Marketing

This advice comes in numerous forms but the main idea is that people recommend that you only talk about your business. That is a huge mistake since the followers are not interested in that, no matter the network. They follow your Twitter account and like your Facebook page when they find valuable content there. If you just talk about your business, why should anyone follow you? People secretly love advertising, especially unsolicited advertising. This is why the 80-20 rule is a good idea. This practically means that out of 10 posts on social networks, 2 should be about your business and 8 need to offer answers to questions or needs the followers have.

Publish As Often As You Can

This advice should be: “consistently publish social media updates”. When you post many times per day there are 2 big problems:

• People will feel harassed or spammed.
• The quality of your posts will suffer.

In the event you post something simply because you want to meet a quota, just do not post it. You should only post in order to help followers and work hard to find content that helps them.

You Do Not Need A Social Media Strategy

While there is no secret social media marketing formula that guarantees success, not having a strategy guarantees failure. You do need a plan, you have to monitor the results of that plan and make changes whenever necessary. Most people do struggle with the creation of this strategy. If you are among them, just start by setting a goal. As an example, your goal can be to have 2 Facebook posts every week. After around 3 months, analyze your analytics and see what gets the best possible results. Adapt and set yourself a new goal to post 1 per day.

Everything Should Be Business – No Personality Should Be Seen

Social media is by definition social. When you only use corporate mumbo jumbo and keep everything 100% politically correct, it is a certainty that people will not really like your pages. You have to let personality show. There is such a thing as a brand personality so do not think that businesses need to be cold on social media!

Final Thoughts

On the whole, social media is all about you interacting with your fans/followers. You want to help them and you want to show that you can be trusted. Also, if you want to hire someone that takes care of social media for you, be sure that he is really good at the job. Ask for reports of results, not testimonials.