7 Steps to Master Real-Time Social Media Engagement

How do you know if you are living up to your customers' expectations? For 51% of brands, real-time social media engagement is their biggest challenge on social media. Always on, always connected customers demand quick and easy solutions, on the fly, to the issues they’re dealing with on a daily basis. However, brands are struggling to meet those expectations and are quickly losing customers, money, and time.

Being able to engage in real-time with your customers won't be an overnight success. The challenges brands face are, however, easy to overcome with this 7-step program. The path to real-time social media engagement starts with acknowledging the challenges brands face and identifying which steps your company needs to take.

Based on brands' current pain points, here's a straightforward 7-step program to master real-time social media engagement:

Step 1: Monitor & Measure the Inflow of Your Brand's Mentions

Listen to your audience on social media and develop an understanding of your brand's reputation. Monitor everything that's being said about your brand, and track all relevant conversations. Don't take immediate action, and listen before even thinking about structuring the way you are going to reply in real-time. Measure who, what, when, where, and how people are talking about your brand.

Step 2: Manage All Incoming Mentions From Just One Place

Keep track of your brand across ALL channels (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and sources (blogs, forums, news sites, etc.) in a unified, simplified way - from just one place. If you are using several tools and managing multiple social media channels at once, messages often slip through the cracks. Make real-time social media engagement less of a daunting chore, and pull all your messages into just one place with one single tool and a centralized inbox.

From that point on, cut down on inefficiencies and create separate mailboxes to make sure every social media team member or departement replies to the right messages. With separate mailboxes organized in just one place, every team member is up to date on what's being sent from all your accounts.

Step 3: Detect Trends & Top Sources With Social Media Analytics

Once brands have an overview of the data they are pulling, determine the main social media channels you need to be active on. Right after Step 2, turn to the analytics to make sense of the pool of information. Track which questions and complaints you get on a frequent basis.

Deep-diving into the data allows brands to grasp a complete, comprehensive overview of the questions and channels that are most important to their brand. By filtering on the correct keywords (your brand name, products, campaigns, etc.) right from the start, brands will be able to filter through the social media noise.

Step 4: Divide The Workload With Strong Filtering & Separate Mailboxes

As brands see an increase in volume of incoming messages through social, there's a huge need to divide the workload amongst all of the social media team members. In this step, you will have to structure the way you are going to reply to incoming messages. Assign individual tasks to the people working in your team to prevent them from duplicating their efforts when responding to customers.

With personalized mailboxes and special user roles, you can grant your social media team members access to a specific number of messages. Structure incoming messages that are only relevant to a certain amount of people in the company. For example, Customer Support, Marketing, and PR can have their own mailbox. By using automated tags, you can send certain mentions to the right mailbox both manually and automatically.

Step 5: Create A Social Engagement Strategy & Empower Your Team

Without a long-term engagement strategy, there’s no value, and the customer is left with a meaningless experience. Create a social engagement strategy that involves all departments. Developing policies isn't a one-man job: compile input from all departments/parties in a company (Sales, HR, Customer Support, Marketing, etc.)

After finalizing your engagement strategy, empower your “frontline” employees to finally put it into practice. Teach the basics, step back, and trust your employees that they will execute it. Understand that you can’t control everything, but educating and empowering your employees is already a huge leap forward.

Step 6: Develop One Central, Self-Service Knowledge Hub

Leverage any type of valuable customer feedback to further optimize a central, well-stacked online knowledge hub you can easily direct your customers to for info. Help them find a solution in just one click. By structuring all of this valuable information and tailoring it to your customers’ needs, brands can reply within instants, increase efficiency, and further develop their product and service.

From a customer’s perspective you only have one relationship with a brand, so storing your information in just one place is essential. Adopt the self-service principle: turn your online support hub into a self-service center which is continuously updated with information to proactively manage customer complaints.

Step 7: Integrate With Other Software to Provide Context for Conversations

Collect as much contextual information about your cross-channel customers as possible. To deliver on an exceptional, unified customer experience, instead of using multiple tools at once, integrate software into one, single social media tool. Develop a well-rounded profile and bundle all of the information you have gathered (through mobile, web, phone, in-store contact, etc.) to complete the digital experience. Integrating other, valuable software adds context to real-time conversations and enables quicker and better solutions.

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6 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Engagement

That being said, there are some areas where you can look to your competition for inspiration when it comes to shaping your own engagement strategy for your target audience. Think of your competitors as your most relevant case study: if it is working for them, then there are likely some aspects of what they are doing that will work for your company as well.

Advertising

While there is no complete way to know how successful a competitors search or print advertising is (unless you have a snitch on the inside), one easy way to tell is if it caught your eye. If you find yourself continuously drawn to one style of ad or wording, then chances are your audience is doing the same.

See what the similarities are that you are drawn to and try to include that feature into your own advertising campaigns.

Communication with Community

See how active your competitor’s social media profiles are. Do their Facebook updates get a lot of shares, comments, or likes? Do they update their Twitter feed regularly? While you shouldn’t copy the content they are sharing, see what gets the most engagement. This is important because their target audience is YOUR target audience. If the audience responds more to posts with photos, try to weave more photos into your posts. Likewise, if you see tweets get shared or retweeted more during a specific time of day (or day of the week), try to experiment with your own Twitter post timing to see if you can produce the same effect.

Design

Look at your competitors’ websites and social media profiles. Is the design relevant and engaging to your community and target audience? The type of industry you are in affects what type of design style that should be implemented in all your online (and print) branding. Try to find a few elements that you think would work for your own company (e.g. a clean look versus a cluttered one; a helpful navigation menu that makes it easy to find interior pages) and compare it to what you are already doing to see how you can improve.

Content

I believe that great content, no matter who it’s from, should be shared. Just because it is someone from your competitor who wrote a great industry piece, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tell anyone about it. I frequently share news, blog posts, events, and information from others in my industry (yes, even direct competitors) and I have found that it helps me not only grow my network, but it also educates me because I’m learning about my industry from a different perspective.

Sharing others’ work (and tagging them in the share post, when possible) will also grow engagement on your end, as often they will retweet your post, like it, etcetera, thus leading to greater visibility for you.

Local Presence

If you’re a local business, check out your competitors’ stores (with a friendly intention) to see what they are offering. Again, this isn’t meant to “copy” what they do –and it especially isn’t meant for you to “accidentally” tip over a display or write a mean review on Yelp– but to see what is working for them versus what isn’t. This is especially helpful if your stores are laid out the same. If you notice yourself lost trying to find a specific product that you know your customers regularly need or you see a display for a product you carry that effectively captures your attention, make those mental notes for how to improve your own store.

Additionally, on the online front, check out the local SEO of your local competitors. They might have a profile on a local directory or website that you can add yourself to as well. It may also be worth seeing if competitors are members of any organizations or chamber of commerces in your area that would  be beneficial for your company to join as well.

Events

Do you keep seeing employees or leaders of your competitors speaking at industry conferences, trade shows, or local events? That just might be the kick in the ass you need to do it yourself. Regularly apply to speak at industry events to help grow your presence, establish your authority, and network with others in your industry.

Checking out your competitors can put you at an advantage, if you are using it as motivation for your own products in motion, instead of relying on them to supply the ingenuity you are just planning on copying. Look to how you can take something others are doing and do it better: this is what will stand out to your target audience.

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6 Ingredients for Your Next Perfect Social Media Post

The posts you share on Social Media are the key to increasing engagement, traffic and awareness of your brand online. Many businesses and marketers want to create posts which will bring virality to their content. But before you jump the gun, there is a lot you must achieve in order to reach that goal; and to do that you will need to create perfect social media posts! So, you’re wondering how?

By the way, Facebook is changing the timeline algorithm again. Hope you already know it from InsideFacebook. The key point is “If a Page posts about a trending topic or if a post sees a high velocity of engagement early on that then drops off, that post may begin to see increased distribution early on and less distribution over time”  so it’s important to get more engagement right after you post something on Facebook to get wider reach.

Social media is a crowded place; you need every competitive advantage possible to stand out. Often marketers get overwhelmed by the following questions – What to post? How to post? And on which platforms? In this article, I’ll go over some simple tricks and best practices to help you create the perfect social media posts. Here we go!

1. Visually Appealing

Visual content is the rising star on social media. Images, videos, Infographics, memes GIF’s etc are a great way to share your brands information. They are easier to grasp by your audiences and it always receives good engagement. This is the generation of easily distracted audiences, thus snackable pieces of information are fared much better in comparison to only text-based information. Hence, make use of various free resources, tools etc. to create visual content which will spark interest from your users and give you that edge over others.

Example: Chobani on their Pinterest page have 25 boards even though it is a yogurt brand. They share amazing pictures which is a mix of their products, lifestyle boards and they have that many followers due to the high quality imagery they share.

2. Be Humorous

Humor makes you stand out; it makes your brand seem more interesting than a pushy salesman and humanizes your brand online. There’s a fine line between funny and offensive, topics like race, religion, and sexual orientation are extremely touchy for some people so don’t cross the line from being funny to creepy. Humor makes your brand like a friend to your audiences and it makes a good light-hearted content which is easy to digest.

Example: Chumbak on their Facebook page, share content which is a mix of honest, adorable and funny! They take on social media to truly engage with their fans through humor. With the fictitious holiday dates they created, give everyone a good laugh and instantly lead to engagement and shows it is a making of a good post.

3. Be Original

Don’t be a fake copy of someone else on social media, be yourself! Your audiences are exposed to so much information every day from numerous brands, for you to stand out ‘Be Original’. Otherwise how will you be able to catch their eye, if you follow the herd and share the same content? If you feel that you are running out of interesting ideas for posts, keep an eye on your competitors and see how what kind of content they are sharing with their users.

Bookmark various blogs – Mashable, Social Media Examiner etc. they are constantly sharing invaluable information regarding social media something might just ignite the inspiration from those sites. Create a post, include meme and share them across.

4. Know the Best Time to Post

It is extremely important to post your content at the right time of the day/hour. What is the use of creating great content if no one is reading it? Your target audiences may be housewives, students and even some spread abroad so you need to constantly share relevant content at the right intervals for them to read it.

Start using tools like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, Post planner if you are not using them already.

5. Crisis Plan

Problem never comes knocking on your door, so you best be prepared! Many a times you may share a post which be shared at the wrong time/ or it may be misunderstood by someone. These things can get your brand in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, thus always have a crisis plan of action ready and immediately own up for your mistakes. Keep a series of crisis posts ready and saved up in one of your folders, so when trouble comes by you don’t get dumb-founded and lost rather you start rolling out the pre-saved posts with certain tweaks and save the day for your brand.

Example: US Airways had a ton of explaining to do to their followers on Twitter, due to the inappropriate image which got shared from their profile. They immediately took to Twitter, deleted the picture and apologized to their fans. Thus always have a crisis plan set up; you may never know when it hits you!

6. Know the Platform Well

Before you set base on any platform, you must thoroughly research it and understand all the functions of that platform and it’s posting style. Keep up with all the changes of various channels and implement those in your strategy. Every platform has a different posting style compared to other, thus create a content calendar so you know what sort of information you are sharing on other channels. If content creation is important, then distribution is the vessel to the perfect post.

Example: Krispy Kreme India, haven’t truly leveraged the power of Twitter. They only link-back all their posts! Thus it shows low engagement and fewer followers. They need to truly craft posts which elicit a response and increase engagement as well as followers.

The structure of your social media posts plays a significant role on what sort of activity it converts – Engagement, traffic, leads etc. The details mentioned above may be a bit nitpicky but they play a big part in the overall content creation. With the examples mentioned as well will get you inspired and in the right course of creating valuable content for your audiences.

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THREE WAYS TO MEASURE SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT THAT AREN’T LIKES OR RETWEETS

On the surface, social media metrics are pretty straightforward. Click the thumbs-up icon if you “like” something, hit “retweet” if you want your followers to see something particularly interesting, tap the heart icon if you see an Instagram photo that’s particularly gorgeous.

While companies should keep track of these measurements, you have the ability to go much deeper with your social media metrics. Instead of constantly refreshing your social media profiles in hopes of a red, blue, or orange notification in your toolbar, consider devoting more time to analyzing social media engagement using these measurements:

1. Reach

Think likes on your Facebook page, followers on Twitter, connections on LinkedIn, views/subscribers on your YouTube channel, and visitors to your blog. As a measure of potential audience size, reach helps you understand how far your content is actually going once you hit “post.”

While it’s nice to know how many eyes are scrolling through your Facebook updates, reach becomes a more valuable metric when you do some simple math to use reach to measure engagement. Choose an action or engagement number that’s important to your company’s social media goals (such as retweets), and divide that number by reach to calculate your engagement percentage.

For example: if you have 4,973 followers on Twitter, and one of your tweets gets 168 retweets, your engagement percentage is 168/4,973, or 3.4%. Now, you know that out of the entire possible audience for your campaign, 3.4% of people participated, giving you a better context for your engagement metrics.

You can also use this reach/engagement measurement to set goals for your social media campaigns. For example, maybe you want each tweet to have a 3% engagement rate or raise Facebook engagement to 5% per post.

 2. Influence

I like to think of this as the “Would Regina George talk about this at her cafeteria table?” metric of social media measurement. That is, you may be putting your message out there, but are people with influence picking up on your message and talking about it themselves- and if so, what kind of impact do these people have on their audience?

One important thing to recognize is that audience size isn’t necessarily positively correlated with influence. Someone with a lot of followers may not be able to compel their followers to complete an action. For example, think about a Twitter account that may tweet out inspirational quotes a few times a day to 12,000 followers. Would you want this account to tweet about your brand? Probably not, because the followers of this Twitter account wouldn’t recognize this account as an authority on your industry and are probably accustomed to skimming a quote and scrolling right past it, rather than using the quote as a catalyst for action. Unless, of course, your company produces inspirational-quote-of-the-day desk calendars!

You can measure your own social influence by using tools like Klout and PeerIndex, and you can also use BuzzSumo to find influencers in your industry and your area- this is also a great tool for conducting outreach.

3. Conversions

You can tweet about your latest promotions or post a quick video to Facebook showing off your latest product, but unless you can measure how many conversions these social media promotions lead to, you’re throwing darts with a blindfold on.

To fix this, institute campaign tracking in your social media efforts. First, build trackable links to use in each of your social media posts using Google’s URL builder (you may need to use a URL shortening service to make your links shorter, like Bitly). Then, use Google Analytics and set up goal tracking to keep track of your online conversions like downloads, registrations, and more. Now, you’ll be able to monitor your conversions and link them back to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can determine your ROI.

Likes and retweets are fun to get, but make sure not to focus solely on those measurements. By including reach, influence, and conversions in your social media metrics, you’ll be able to get a more complete picture of your how your audience is reacting to and engaging with the content you put on your social media channels.

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How Big Brands Keep Their Social Media Audiences Engaged

#1: Host a Video Contest

For the last seven years, Doritos has run its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest asking customers to create commercials for its crunchy treats. The incentive that really caught attention? The winner gets his or her commercial aired during the Super Bowl.

The response is huge. Hundreds of commercials are submitted. The company narrows it down to a pool of five, and then asks everyone to vote for their favorite.

The result is a viral campaign driven by finalists sharing their entry with friends and encouraging them to vote, as well as customers and fans who want to see the best videos (which are usually the funniest).

In 2013, Doritos brought the video contest to Facebook (they had previously used a microsite) and went beyond the success of all previous years.

Facebook increased entries for Doritos’ yearly video contest.

If you take a look at the Doritos Facebook page, this contest supplied content for months and generated a lot of conversation. Customers started watching videos, commenting on the commercials and asking about the rules.

This one post alone has almost 50,000 likes, 1,800+ comments and about 3,000 shares.

Doritos drums up votes for its video contest.

Use this idea: Create a video contest with a public voting aspect to draw people to your page. You can cull the entries down, and then ask the public to vote for the final winner.

While you may not be able to pay to showcase a video during the biggest sporting event of the year, do make the prize as appealing as possible.

Creating a video is a lot of work. If you ask customers to put in the time, they’ll need a reason to do so. You don’t have to go overboard, but the bigger the incentive, the more participants you’ll have.

#2: Share Customer Stories

Dunkin’ Donuts asked its Twitter audience to tell a story about how the company’s popular coffee fit into their everyday lives. The catch, of course, was that the story had to fit into 131 characters (entries had to include #mydunkin and that took up nine characters).

After combing through tens of thousands of stories, the company selected several winners and asked the tweeters to star in their own Dunkin’ commercial. The company shot the commercials, uploaded them to YouTube, shared them on Twitter and then asked for more stories.

Winners of the #mydunkin stories on Twitter got their own commercials.

Use this idea: Learn how customers use your product by asking them to share their story on Twitter (using a hashtag so you can easily track the entries).

It’s a challenge to tell a story in 140 characters, but the results are fun and usually witty. Since people love entertaining content, you’re likely to reach even more people who want to join in or comment.

Incentives always increase engagement, but the prize doesn’t have to be huge in this case. Offer a prize related to your business or something a little quirky to catch attention.

#3: Add an Element of Fun

You don’t always have to offer a prize in exchange for comments. Coca-Cola hosts a trivia question of the day to boost interaction. There are no prizes, but the tactic works.

General trivia questions work fine, but Coke uses out-of-the-box questions like, “Which of the following is worth the most Scrabble points?”

The company takes advantage of their fans’ curiosity by posting two updates: one with the trivia question and one with the answer.

Coke entices engagement with fun questions.

The result is that fans comment with their guesses on the first update, then come back to find out the answer and comment on the second update as well. The more fans interact with a page, the more likely it is to show up in their news feed.

With each trivia update, Coke is subtly promoting their product, getting double engagement and showing up more in their fans’ news feed.

Use this idea: Use trivia questions to share a little about your product or service. For instance, ask customers to guess what year your business started or what your top-selling product is. Be sure to give the answer in a separate update to bring them back!

#4: Ask for Customer Ideas

Nissan recently asked customers to tweet ideas about what kind of technology should be in the special version of the Juke NISMO (using #Jukeride). Since people love to share their opinions, suggestions started rolling in.

To keep the momentum going, Nissan uploaded behind-the-scenes videos showing customers how the company was using their suggestions.

Nissan asked fans for input, listened and showed the results.

Use this idea: Ask your customers and fans to help you improve one of your products, share ideas about products they’d like to see or come up with a name for a new product you’re about to roll out.

Nissan used Twitter, but the idea works on any social platform. Wherever your fans are most active, that’s where you want to start.

#5: Provide Recurring Content

Remember when your favorite journalist had a weekly column? Estée Lauder adapted that idea as a social media tactic.

Every Tuesday, the company’s creative makeup director, Tom Pecheux, offers a makeup tip on Facebook. The #TomsTuesdayTip campaign offers advice, features a picture of a related beauty product and links to a purchase page or blog article about recent trends.

Estée Lauder consistently offers makeup tips.

Estée Lauder created their own hashtag, but there are established hashtags that achieve similar engagement.

The weekly column receives a lot of comments and questions and the company responds to them as quickly as possible. The weekly tip format, along with company interaction, gives fans confidence that the company is listening to them, which results in more conversation.

Estée Lauder talks to fans who comment.

Use this idea: Come up with a weekly feature using a consistent hashtag. You can create your own or ride the wave of an existing hashtag to get things started.

#TBT (Throwback Thursday) is a popular one. Just post a picture of the early days of your company, product or a related topic. Funny pictures tend to have the most comments and shares.

Whichever option you choose, be consistent and offer valuable content on a regular basis. If you set the expectation of a weekly share and don’t come through, fans lose interest.

To make it easier, use an editorial calendar to gather ideas, then use a tool like HootSuite or Facebook’s scheduling option to post updates automatically.

If you start a weekly topic, begin by posting on your most popular social profile. When the feature is established, use it to push fans to another platform where you’re offering a new weekly feature. You can grow your conversation and fan base on each social channel.

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4 Steps to Building an Engaging Presence on Social Media

#1: Build a Targeted Community

The first step is to build a community of people who care about what your brand has to offer.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page or all of the above. As long as you have a starting point, you can start building your audience on social media.

Haphazardly trying to build a large community won’t be very helpful. Your best bet will be to build a targeted community. How do you build targeted communities? Generally speaking, there are two ways.

Organic Community-Building

To build a community through organic means, you must provide share-worthy and useful content that’s relevant specifically to the audience you want to reach. The more your content (on any social network) gets shared, the more eyes see it.

Whole Foods shares recipes that its food-based community will enjoy and then share with others.

If you consistently produce enough great content, people naturally gravitate toward your brand. Be sure to leverage hashtags when appropriate so your content is categorized correctly and easy to find.

While it might sound cliché, content aimed at your specific intended audience will help lay the groundwork for organically building a loyal community.

Paid Community-Building 

Paid community-building is traditionally much faster than its organic counterpart.

By leveraging the paid advertising options of social media channels, you cansupercharge the growth of your community by hyper-targeting the people who are most likely to want to connect with you.

While most of the major social networks currently offer paid advertising options, I highly recommend leveraging Facebook ads to help build a targeted community.

Use targeting to put your paid social ads in front of the right people.

Facebook ads can be extremely useful when you’re trying to get in front of a particular group of people. The targeting options within Facebook ads are so granular that you can target users by interest, age, gender, language, education level and location.

If you’re an insurance company looking to build an audience, you should consider targeting people with interests relating to insurance, risk management, financial services and other interests that might be in the same arena.

With the right strategy, it’s entirely possible to acquire hyper-targeted fans for as little as $0.25 per fan. It doesn’t take a huge budget to make a big impact.

No matter what interest is related to your brand, there’s an audience for it on Facebook.

If you decide another social media network is a better fit for your brand, Twitter,LinkedIn and Google+ all offer opportunities for paid social ads.

#2: Leverage Unused Brand Assets

The next step is to perform a complete audit of your brand assets to identify unused or underutilized content. This process may be time-consuming; however, you can discover valuable pieces of content that have been previously overlooked.

Content Inventory

There are a few ways to do an audit of your brand assets. I recommend you start by asking a series of questions:

• What is your mission statement?
• What idea or concept created the brand originally?
• How many blogs do you have?
• How many images?
• What content are you not using for promotion?

These questions are meant to make you think less about what you are doing and more about what you aren’t doing.

Many brands have an extremely compelling story to tell and they don’t even realize it.

You know that feeling when you look under the bed to find that long-lost favorite t-shirt? That’s exactly the goal of searching for unused brand assets. You never know what you’ll find unless you look!

#3: Identify Indirect Content Opportunities

Now that you’ve rediscovered valuable brand assets, it’s time to map out your content strategy.

To draft a social media content plan, brands usually rely on concepts that are directly related to what they sell or do. This is a tad shortsighted, in my opinion. There are many other opportunities available when you take a step back and identify all of the concepts that are indirectly related to your brand.

For instance, if you are a real estate company, your social channels are probably filled with listings, employee information and maybe even home-buying blogs. Why not mix in some home decorating tips or famous homes from movies? This type of content will spark engagement and support your future “normal” content.

TOMS retweeted content from another brand that shares its values and will appeal to its followers.

Everything you post doesn’t have to be about what you offer, nor do you want to publish content that has nothing at all to do with your brand. Find a middle ground where you leverage content that isn’t exactly about your product or service, but is related to it.

Coca-Cola does a great job here leveraging National Pi Day.

Pi has nothing to do with Coke; however, people drink Coke while eating pie… and pie sounds likePi so this works.

#4: Listen to Your Community

The last part of this puzzle is to utilize content that comes from your social community. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail in social media. Everyone is looking for it! However, sometimes UGC isn’t as obvious as you’d think it would be. Most of the time, the good stuff is right in front of you and you don’t even see it.

When users reply to content on social sites, they’re basically telling you what they want. Pay special attention to the Comments section. This is where you’ll find ideas that you can turn into solid content campaigns.

We all know that listening is a huge part of social media; however, we have to know how to listen and what to listen for. It’s not just simply monitoring the conversation to make sure your community is happy. Truly listening to what they have to say can produce amazing content that you might not come up with on your own!

Warsteiner USA posted a plain text update asking a question about Thanksgiving recipes and received a reply that would make a great graphic or video.

Look to your comments and replies to find great content ideas from your community.

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10 Mistakes We’ve All Made on Social Media (And How To Fix Them)

Mistakes happen to even the best of us – we know first-hand from the helpful comments informing us whenever there’s grammatical error. But, that’s just human nature. And we all make mistakes. However, you can at least make the effort to be as flawless as possible. Especially when it comes to social media.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Whether you’re using social media as a way to keep in touch with friends and family or as a marketing tool, you’re likely well aware of how powerful social media channels have become. When used correctly and mistake-free, you can successfully promote yourself, brand, or product. If you have a major hiccup, you can harm your reputation, both personally and professionally, for years. After all, even if you delete that angry rant you posted on Facebook, someone saw it. Someone might have even saved it. Regardless, that one mistake won’t be going away anytime soon.

For example, take the following 10 mistakes. We’ve all fell victim to them at one time or another. And, hopefully, we’ve learned a lesson.

1. Treating All Social Media Platforms the Same

We’re almost 100% sure that you don’t have to be a social media genius to realize that every social media platform is different. Each format varies from channel to channel by offering different languages to different audiences. In fact, just take a look at your social media accounts. Did you notice someone, it can be a person or brand, that is sending out the same message on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn? Looks a bit impersonal and spammy, right?

Instead of just sending out the same message on different social media outlets, take the time to better understand what each service offers and how they work. From there, you’ll be able to customize messages that will be more effective. Also, keep in mind that you may have multiple accounts, one for business and the other for personal, which will determine the content that you share.

2. Posting at Inappropriate Times

Be honest. We’ve all had those times when the thought process was just a bit impaired – either because we’re tired, emotional, or had one too many drinks. If that’s the case, posting should probably be avoided. Before sending out a message that you’ll regret later, stop and think about what you’re doing. You’ll be glad you did when clear-headed.

But, there are other scenarios when we post at inappropriate times. For example, do you think that anyone is going to be reading that amazing blog post that you just wrapped up at 2am on a Wednesday morning? Probably not. Do you think that someone in California will respond to a tweet that a New Yorker sent out at 8am EST? Most likely not.

In short, you don’t want to be active when no one else is online. After all, that defeats the point of being on social media. In the future, try to be aware of the best times to post. For example, on Facebook, engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. As for Twitter, weekdays have 14% more engagement than weekends with 5pm having the highest amounts of retweets.

3. Placing Quantity Over Quality

Quality should always be your focus; not how much you post or how many friends/followers you have in your network. You should be sharing great content and searching for people who will engage and support you or your brand. For example, having 1,000 highly engaged followers is more beneficial than paying or hacking for 100,000 followers who will never develop loyalty to you or your brand.

As opposed to posting 10 sub-par articles per day, focus on several pieces that will drive traffic and spark discussions.

4. Not Taking Advantage of Bio

It’s not uncommon for the first item for visitors to spot on you social media page is a bio. Since this the norm, make sure that you complete this section with vital information, like location and website [URL]. And, have a little fun with it. If you’re creative and interesting, this will give others more of an incentive to follow or like you.

5. Not Posting Enough vs. Posting Too Much

As you may have picked up by now, there’s a certain rhyme and reason with how much and how minimal you post on your social media platforms. We all have that person we’re following on Twitter who will send out 20 tweets in the span of one minute. And, we probably have that friend who logs onto Facebook once a month only to vent about how awful their life is going. Neither extreme is productive. Posting too much comes across as spam. Posting too little means that you’re easily forgotten. So, what’s the magical number of times you should post a day?

That depends on your audience. Listening to your niche is a great way to understand how often you post, however, several times a day sounds a lot better than several times an hour. Guy Kawasaki has a cool method. He’ll post the same content on Twitter four times a day, but eight hours apart. This way, he’ll be able to reach different audiences, but without saturating his followers timelines.

6. Using Automated Messages

Have you followed someone and instantly receive a message thanking you and to download their new e-book? It’s discouraging and feels way too much like spam – which no one likes. While we realize that you can’t be “on” 24/7, you should at least make the effort to interact with people as often as you can with a personal and sincere message. Knowing that there’s a real person there who took the time to respond can go a long way in establishing trust and engagement.

Also, while not always the most pleasant of circumstances to deal with, you also may have to personally respond to negative messages or compliments. Instead of ignoring the problem, try to work out your differences. If you don’t think it is important, just be aware that LiveOps discovered that 85 percent of consumers feel how a brand handles issues on its website or social channels is a good indicator of its quality of support.

7. Not Proofreading

We’ll be honest, and so should you. At one time or another, we’ve all posted a message in a hurry, which in turn, is full of misspellings. While there are occasions where auto-correct takes over – even if you didn’t ask - grrr – always take the extra time to proofread your message. You’re not writing a novel here, so it shouldn’t take that long. And, it’s one of the easiest ways to protect your reputation.

8. Using Social Media Only as a Megaphone

Social media is a two-way street. This means that it can’t be just one person talking all the time. It’s a conversation. You need to be active on all platforms. Don’t just talk about yourself or only share your work. Post content that will generate discussions. Pay attention to the people in your network. In other words, show people you care about them, and not just yourself. You’d be surprised how this type of interaction pays off.

9. Not Properly Using @, # and Images

If you previously read our Twitter hacks article, then you may remember the trick where a period was placed before @. The reason? When only using @, Twitter sees this a reply, which means you and the other person you’re replying to can see the messages. By placing a period, or even ‘the’, will make the message visible to everyone in your feed.

Speaking of symbols, how about #? While including hashtags can boost engagement, please, please don’t overdo it. Posting irrelevant and trending hashtags is just tacky and won’t assist in lead generation. For example, if a car dealership is promoting a holiday sale, why would they post trending pop culture hashtags? It may get them noticed, but it won’t help with sales. One final note regarding hashtags, don’t saturate your social media accounts with #this and #that for every other word you type. Keep it around one or two per post. #dontbeajerk

Finally, make sure you have visual aids. As a whole, we really enjoy images.

10. Saying Too Much

We’re all busy people. And we don’t have time to read War and Peace every single time we login into a social media account. Keep things short and to the point. This is especially important on Twitter where the 140-character limit is perhaps its most well-known feature. Instead of devoting too much time on word or character-length, stick to tweets that are under 100 characters, which have been proven to receive 17 percent more engagement.

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