(some unwritten etiquette)
Social media is great because you can reach a global audience. But it isn’t always straightforward; there are many opportunities to commit faux pas for the inexperienced! Here are a few that we’ve seen:
In your E-Newsletters – keep the ratio of content to promotion as 70% to 30% if you want people to continue to subscribe. (This month’s Savvy Marketing Tips has more about E-Newsletters – subscribe so you don’t miss an issue!)
Reply to Blog commenters. To have people comment on your posts is what every blogger wants. Be polite and thank those who have taken the time and trouble to add to the conversation.
Don’t keep promoting your own stuff, not even free reports. This can become tiresome very quickly. Of course you need to include a link in your email signature and resource box, but please not in every welcome message on every network you belong to.
Remember to attribute quotes or content to the originator and link back in your blog, tweet, or other feed. The originators will thank you (or at least they should if they have any manners!) and be more inclined to look for ways to reciprocate. Trying to imply that you’re the author when you aren’t is misleading and can damage your reputation online.
One way to build good relationships on Twitter is to ‘Retweet’ someone else’s tweet. What that does is to copy their message to all your followers. If anyone is kind enough to retweet for you, then it is good manners to thank them using either @ or DM.
Again on Twitter, it is considered polite to reply to @messages sent to you. However, if the conversation goes beyond a couple of tweets, it’s a good idea to take it off the main twitter stream and DM instead.
Some people get a little over-excited online, especially on Twitter! Because there are only 140 characters per tweet, they go overboard and post tweet after tweet in a short space of time. Once again, this can get annoying very quickly and lead to being ‘unfollowed’. The exception to this is when ‘reporting’ live from an event.
Have you come across any bad manners online? We’d love it if you could let us know (and we promise to acknowledge ‘genuine’ comments!)
