If you want to get the most out of your social media marketing efforts, it’s just as important to know what you should avoid as it is to know what you should be doing. To help you out, here’s a list of best practices for both categories:

Avoid These 4 Things

1. The first thing to avoid is acting like social media is nothing more than a megaphone for you to make business announcements. Since the majority of users are on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ because they like to interact with others, you need to actually engage before you can expect to see any positive results.

2. The second mistake to avoid is not allowing your employees to use social media to get things done. If you’re going to put them on these networks, make sure they can actually take action when someone reaches out with a question or complaint. Otherwise, your business is just going to make itself look bad.

3. The third item you can steer clear of is constantly using hashtags. Although plenty of businesses constantly use hashtags because they think it’s trendy or will increase their visibility, the reality is it just makes them look silly. While there are plenty of legitimate uses for hashtags, just be sure you don’t cross the line into spammy territory.

4. Last but not least is to not overpromise. Even though it’s important to share content, make sure the content you share is actually good stuff. Otherwise, it’s not going to take long for people to lose interest in clicking your links.

Make These 5 Social Media Strategies a Priority

1. First on the list is you should use a URL shortener. Not only will this prevent messages from looking cramped as a result of a long URL, but it will also give you more tracking information about how well different links perform.

2. Next up is to make good use of images. While it’s obvious that platforms like Pinterest and Instagram are driven by images, even on other sites, intelligently using images will allow you to get more attention for the things you share and post.

3. Third is to unleash your creativity and desire to experiment. Although plenty of businesses are a little scared to try different things, the reality is as long as you steer clear of doing anything offensive, you’ll probably get a lot out of being open to new things. Not everything will work, but the things that do can greatly increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

4. The last two things are to take advantage of proven tools for social media management, and keep an eye for new trends within the social world. The former will help you streamline the time you spend on social media, while the latter should expose you to some interesting opportunities.

5. Even if your results from social media have been stalled, once you put this information into action, you’ll find that it doesn’t take long to start seeing the type of results you’ve always expected from social media marketing.

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