Long-time Tweeple, Linked Inners & Facebookers are quietly grumbling about the newbies who have turned these community sites into a spam farm. Some, unfortunately are professional hackers and phishers. Others are just ignorant masses trying to make that elusive ‘quick-buck’. For my readers who genuinely want to build their businesses online without becoming one of ‘those people’, here is my current list of 10 Ways to Sabotage Your Online Marketing.*
- Using Facebook as your eNews delivery: Just because someone agrees to friend you doesn’t mean they have opted in to your business pitches or causes. After receiving weekly junk mail your ‘friends’ will be saying, “Just more junk from Spam-girl.” DELETE
- Mistaking LinkedIn for real business connections: They like to call themselves open networkers or LIONs – people who seem to be having some race to have the most contacts. It’s a safe bet that within a few weeks, this person will solicit me.
- Tweeting untitled links: ‘Hey, this is a really cool blog. Check it out!’ P.T.Barnum is alive and well online because suckers are clicking this junk. Spammers and phishers love this technique.
- Inviting Facebook friends to something every week: Remember the guy in high school that would ask every girl in the class to go to prom in hopes that someone might say yes? This is the same thing and it reeks like that boy’s tennis shoes.
- Picking fights with a LinkedIn Discussion author: If it’s something that bugs you, pass. When you get in the face of any contributor no matter how right you might be, you look like a pompous fool or a bully.
- Posting mainly solicitations: This one is so obvious that I can’t believe people do it.
- Using your Twitter autoresponders to get people to click junk: Blatant claims to ’show you how to get 10,000 followers a day’ makes me want to unfollow you immediately.
- Hijacking a post when commenting: It usually begins with a compliment, then it quickly rolls into an article they wrote or a product pitch.
- Faking interest in someones business with the covert plan to sell them something: ‘I am really interested in learning more. Can we schedule time to talk?’ This is like that person that visits your networking group, gets everyone’s business card and puts you all on their email list.
- Using your group manager status as your soapbox: If you have a group on LinkedIn or Facebook, people joined to either support you or learn something more about that topic. Making your posts priority so they sit on top all the time or sending ‘Wow – look at this great thing I’m doing’ loses them.
Okay – I’m getting down off my soapbox now. I’ve gotten that off my chest and hope you don’t do any of these. But, in case you do and need further intervention I will post Part 2 next week with remedies and suggestions that will elevate your status. It’s never too late to right an online wrong.
*There are probably a lot more than 10, but these are the repeat offenders.
