Social Media No-Nos

Tick Yes presents… 7 things you do that annoy your social media following

We all want to be liked, perhaps more so on social media platforms than in any other area of our lives. Following on from this logic, it makes sense that very few of us want what we post online to be creating bad blood within our networks. But do you really know how your online behaviour is being perceived?

Here are seven things that are bound to annoy a decent chunk of your friends…

1.   You write messages to your child on Facebook, even though said child is four weeks old and cannot yet identify shapes, let alone interact with you through a Facebook account. FYI, four weeks – or any other random number of months or days – is not a birthday, so you can quit with the ‘happy 10 days old to my special little guy. Mummy and Daddy love you’.
2.   You post indulgent status updates about how in love you are or, worse, engage in a back-and-forth with that special someone that reads like the inside of a Valentine’s Day card. Shane Warne and Elizabeth Hurley, we’re looking at your and your Twitter exchanges here…
3.   You fish for attention with vague or enigmatic statements.
4.   You post self-portraits in which you are pouting, usually with the caption ‘me being bored’. If you’re bored, eat an entire packet of Chicken Twisties and Google celebrity cellulite pictures like a normal person, don’t pout into your iPhone then act like you aren’t desperately fishing for compliments.
5.   You write extensively about the healthy food you eat. ‘Gluten-free, fat free muffin with Quinoa salad and acai berry smoothie for lunch today’ is entirely unacceptable. Of course, posting about something extravagant and indulgent is perfectly fine – people love to live vicariously through others when it comes to fatty food.
6.   You like thousands of pages. Not sure why this one is so annoying, but nothing ruins your credibility more than ‘Jane likes “going for runs” and 2345 other pages’.
7.   You send people Farmville requests. Seven times a day.

AS ever, while these are personal issues, they are also relevant to business social media usage. So if you or your staff are tempted to do any of the above on your business page, it’s time to develop and implement a proper social media strategy.