1. Sharing articles on Facebook

   Facebook is a visually-driven social network. Effective Facebook pages mostly contain community images, team photos, and event photos that attract audiences’ attention. Companies such as Lululemon Athletica have done an outstanding job in building an exciting Facebook page by featuring photos of athletes running, people doing yoga, as well as videos of people participating in various contests. This has helped Lululemon build a robust, highly-engaged community where users are more likely to share content with their friends and advocate the brand. Conversely, sharing plain, textual articles produces underwhelming results. In our experience, posting articles on Facebook generally creates minimal or zero web traffic and Facebook engagements. This will not only hurt a company’s image, but also damage their Facebook ranking on News Feed. This will unfortunately create obstacles for them to expand their reach and interactions with prospects. Afterall, a major objective with any social media strategy is to build relevant brand awareness!

2. Gaining attention by retweeting

   While retweeting relevant content can help you nurture a positive relationship between you and your Twitter followers, it’s only impactful if you’ve already built an existing connection with them. Retweeting is only useful in relationship bonding if you’ve interacted with the Twitter user in the past and induced them to follow you. If you haven’t done these things, it’s unlikely that the Twitter user will respond to your retweets as they don’t know who you are, who they’ll be able to reach with your retweet, and why you retweeted their content. Moreover, they’ll most likely know that you’re simply trying to augment your followership by retweeting their content. To avoid appearing like an attention-indulging maniac, you can establish relationship with your prospects first by following them and interacting with their tweets. This approach is subtler and can help you gradually build a relationship with your prospective clients.

3. Tweeting all the time

   Bombarding people’s feeds with your tweets is a fantastic way to become unfollowed. While it’s important to tweet frequently by using original content (approximately 3 times a day), it’s meaningless and hurtful to tweet all the time. When we say all the time, we mean twice every hour from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. By tweeting often, you’ll disrupt your audience’s content reading experience. This will cause you to lose your followers as people don’t want to be disrupted when they’re trying to find quality content to read. We’ve experienced this unfortunate outcome first-hand and we suggest that marketers should only create and publish tweets roughly 2 or 3 times a day. This will help you maintain your followership while reducing the amount of time wasted on creating content that will unlikely yield positive returns.

4. Tweeting over the weekend and in the evening

   Although business and technology publications such as Entrepreneur.com have adviced marketers to tweet on the weekend as their research shows that engagement is generally higher on weekends, we’ve had the opposite result. We’ve found that tweeting on weekends can actually decline followership. One possible reason for this phenomenon is that many Twitter users are independent consultants, marketers, or business professionals who are on Twitter frequently during the weekday and the last thing they want to see on the weekend is an article on how to improve their Google search ranking. Hence, it’s may not be optimal to create and schedule content for the weekend as it can undesirably garner awful results.

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