When we write and work on things that we are enthusiastic about, it is natural to want to share. The number one biggest pitfall of social media marketing, however, is that too many people become spammers in effort to promote themselves.
The trap of social media marketing
Inbound and relationship marketing is about building your authority and online community, becoming known for your knowledge in a particular area. Knowing this, it can be tempting to constantly post about your own content, your views and opinions on news, and generally self-promote. The problem, though, is that consistently only self-promoting turns you into the person at the cocktail party everyone else ends up avoiding.
Defining a spammer
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Use a cocktail party mindset
The trick is to think of social media marketing like you are at a cocktail party. The popular folks at these parties are the ones who ask others to talk about themselves, share interesting tidbits that they have picked up. They talk about themselves or their projects only when someone else asks or when it is generally appropriate. Talking about yourself isn’t bad, talking about only yourself is.
The SEO problem
Being a social media spammer not only hurts your reputation, it can do damage to your search engine optimization efforts. Search engines are refocusing on content and user-friendly design. Combined, consistently posting just one link or the same content over and over again has the same affect as lots of duplicate content: eventually, your social media accounts are devalued, as are the sites they link to. In short, spamming is not going to help your search engine optimization in the long term.
So, you’ve been spamming?
So have you recently realized that you’ve been spamming? There is an easy way to fix it: Stop. Start being more friendly, talking with other people, and contributing to conversations in a meaningful way. Your reputation as a spammer will fade slowly, but keep at it, and it will eventually go away.