Social media is an effective place to find and engage with the tribe of people who understand the message and product that you’re developing. They’re not just your ideal target audience, but loyal fans who want to spread the word about what you’re doing.
By sharing relevant updates and engaging with followers, you can rapidly build your email list, develop buzz for a launch, connect with strategic partners, and much more to give your business a boost.
Unfortunately, social media is also the perfect place to alienate people. A poorly timed joke, a customer service meltdown, or a disgruntled customer can lead to a mass exodus of followers. Even your most loyal fans can be lost in the crowd.
To avoid a global snub across your social media channels, you’ll need to avoid certain traps and stay in tune. Here are eight surefire ways you can lose followers on social media.
How to Lose Followers on Social Media
1. All You Talk About is You
It’s normal to want your social media followers to care about you and buy your products and services. But if that’s all you talk about, you’ll find yourself hemorrhaging followers until there’s no one left.
Operate under the assumption that no one is really interested in you. Instead, they’re really interested in themselves and how you can help them. If you don’t talk about your audience’s pain points and how you can help them solve their problems, they’ll find someone who will. Approach your conversations about yourselves in a way that shows how you can best help serve your audience.
2. You Post Way too Often
You’ve probably heard that it’s important to post frequently, especially on Twitter. But don’t overdo it and saturate your feed without giving your followers a chance to catch up and care enough to respond. The life of a tweet is only 24 minutes, but that doesn’t mean you need to be posting something new several times an hour on Twitter. Even on Facebook, you’ll likely be better off posting just once or twice per day.
Think about it from your own perspective as a consumer – if you followed an account that posted more often than that, wouldn’t you find it annoying and stop following the profile?
3. You Post the Same Thing Over and Over
Sometimes companies worry that their followers aren’t seeing every post, so they say the same thing over and over on social media. This practice is especially rampant Twitter.
However, keep in mind that repetitive posts give the impression that your company is lazy, uncreative or just clueless. It’s even worse if the repeated content is promotional in nature — you’re essentially making two dangerous mistakes with one set of tweets.
Another way that companies make this mistake is using the same source for posts repeatedly. Your industry may have a great blog with thought-leading posts, but if you share those posts over and over, you’ll get a “me-too” reputation that will cause people to stop following you.
4. You Don’t Use Pictures and Videos
It’s amazing how much of a difference graphics and video make when you’re engaging followers online. Visuals are a central part of how we consume information, and tweets with images receive 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more likes, and 150 percent more retweets. A picture really is worth 1,000 words, and if you don’t use pictures and videos, you’ll find that your fans stop following you and look for accounts with more interesting content.
5. You Don’t Engage Your Followers
Social media has become the arena where consumers feel comfortable interacting directly with brands. Whether it’s replying to comments, thanking fans for shares, or providing amazing customer service, your company has to interact with followers on social media or risk losing followers in droves.
6. You Overuse Hashtags
#Not #every #word #in #a #post #is #a #hashtag. If your posts look at all like the preceding sentence, it’s not only annoying, it’s really difficult to read.
Use hashtags sparingly and judiciously if you want your messages to stand out and make an impact with your audience. The reason you use hashtags is to find targeted followers and extend your reach, so only incorporate them with relevant keywords in your headline or post.
Certainly, some platforms – Instagram, in particular – allow for extra hashtags, as they’re used more for commentary than for customer reach. A good rule of thumb on other platforms, however, is to use no more than two in one update on Twitter and Facebook.
7. You Ask But Never Give
Repeatedly asking followers for shares, retweets, referrals, sales, and more without offering a single thing in return is alienating. People won’t follow accounts that feel like they’re simply leeches looking for people to do their legwork for them. If your company doesn’t offer value, you won’t be able to keep followers on social media.
8. You Mass-Tag Without Permission
Mass-tagging without permission isn’t just annoying, it’s also against the Terms of Service on most platforms and could get your account suspended. If you post something and tag everyone under the sun without their permission, you’ll ended up on their spam lists or be accused of being a social media bot. Regardless of why you’re mass-tagging without permission, the end result is still the same. You’ll end up losing followers in waves.
Running a powerful social media presence for your company is relatively simple in theory, but surprisingly difficult to execute. It takes time and patience to build a following, engage those followers and turn them into fans and customers. By avoiding these eight mistakes that’ll lose you followers quickly, you’ll avoid sabotaging those efforts and protect your growth online.
What other mistakes have you seen companies make online to lose followers on social media?
Follow Image via Shutterstock
Aira Bongco
I hate those mass taggers. They always tag me with things that I am not really interested in. And I wonder where they even got my name.
I use social media because I want to share some stuff that I discovered while surfing online. I think the best way not to lose followers is to be yourself. If your followers see how genuine you are, the more they will stick on you. Don’t pretend to be somebody you’re not.
Jonathan Alvin
Point 7 applies on me. I want other to share or retweet my content but I don’t ever do the same for them. I hope I can get rid of this bad habbit and increase my followers a bit more. Thanks for sharing this article.
Thank you Sujan for sharing this article. It’s a good one. I agree with everything. To summarise your article I would just like to add that Marketers should focus on showing the human face of their business by writing quality content with empathy. Empathy is the key to social media success these days.
Hi Sujan,
#1- You talk about yourself to much… This point just reminds me of Instagram. When people have a ‘business account’ but all they do is have pictures of the own lifestyle.
Also you ‘ask but never give’ is a guaranteed unfollow from me!
I absolutely hate mass taggers, I unfollow them right away. Another thing that I do not like is the auto-response thing, almost all the time, the response is very far from what you are asking or talking about.
Rhonda Deeney
The most annoying thing is repeated posts. I lose patience with this. It almost desperate/begging.