5 Social Media Messaging Faux Pas

Although you might have the best of intentions, some of the things you’re doing on messenger may be diminishing your credibility and causing you to lose, instead of attracting potential clients to your business.

If you’re doing any of the following things, it’s time to stop…immediately:

1.) Stop making your first interaction on Social Media a private message asking people to buy from you.

Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram – when you do this, you immediately look desperate and you undermine any chance you might have at building a relationship and cultivating a lead.

It doesn’t matter what your business is. People like to buy but they do not like to be sold.  People are not interested in helping you get your first sale, build your up-line, your list, whatever it may be.  You need to lead with value and stop listening to the hucksters that tell you this spammy approach works.

2.) Stop chasing money, and start attracting business.

If you are a direct sales person for a multi-level marketing company and you’re constantly using private messages to build your business and promote your products, you’re giving the entire industry a bad name.  I buy products from some of these companies and I do so when I want to.

When people constantly message me the newest item without any regard for whether I might be interested or not and then follow up by email and text message, it is annoying and makes me stop buying from them.

Recently I posted a filter free image of myself on Facebook. Within seconds, a person liked it and then sent me a private message trying to sell me a product that could diminish the fine lines on my face…seriously. Learn from this example and do not do this to people.

The basics of selling indicate you should sell what people want, not what you think they need when they haven’t even asked for it. When you do this, once again, you alienate a potential lifelong customer and frankly, it’s really bad etiquette.

3.) Stop lifting people’s email address from their social media profile the minute you connect with them and add them to your mailing list.

Not only does this violate CanSpam and CASL legislation, it’s tacky and annoying. Yes, I can unsubscribe but I shouldn’t have to.

If your content is so bad that you have to lift emails, perhaps you should invest in creating something of value that people actually WANT to receive in their inbox. Those efforts would be a much better use of your time.

4.) Stop sending sales pitches to people you know via messenger without taking two seconds to read what is going on with the person you are messaging.

Social media gives you an intimate look at what is happening with people’s personal lives. There is no excuse for sending your pitch to someone who is grieving the loss of a pet or family member.  This has happened to me, and to clients of mine.  Once again, it makes the sender appear desperate and clueless. Don’t make this mistake.

5.) Stop using bots to sell without context.

Yes, I know it’s tempting to abdicate your personal responsibility to generate leads in your business to an untrained computer algorithm but please don’t do it.

Social Media is about relationships.  If you want those relationships to lead to revenue generating opportunities, you need to exercise some common sense.  Get to know people, listen more than you post, offer help when it makes sense and for goodness sakes, stop acting like an inexperienced businesses owner by trying to sell before you’ve even said hello.

Let me know in the comments, what really grinds your gears when it comes to social media messaging?