September 18, 2016
Are your social media posts annoying?
Do your social pages suffer from low, or nonexistent, engagement?
Whether you’re posting too much, too little, or can’t seem to stop selling yourself, we’ve got the inside track on exactly what users find to be oh-so-annoying on social media.
Bothersome Behavior
According to the Q3 2016 Sprout Social Index:
“While 86% of social media users follow a brand, nearly 60% of them are annoyed with too many promotions by brands.”
Sprout breaks down other bad behavior to avoid with your social media posts:
- 41% will unfollow a brand that doesn’t share relevant information
- 71% have unfollowed a brand because they were embarrassed (Amy’s Baking Company, anyone??)
- 1 in 4 people are annoyed when you don’t respond to them
- 38% of people find the use of slang to be irritating
- 32% are annoyed when a brand tries to be funny–when they clearly are not
- 34% of people find a lack of personality annoying
Posting these 6 types of social media updates? Fans may label you SO ANNOYING.
But the biggest grievance by far is over posting promotions:
[Image: Sprout Social Q3 2016 Index]
This is a scary fact considering that — according to the same report — the majority of followers will come to your social profile looking for deals and promotions (58%) or incentives (42%).
So what’s a Community Manager to do?
- Stay Calm
- Breathe
- Keeping Reading …
Discovering Annoying Social Media Posts
How do you know if your social media posts are turning off your audience? And then, how do you fix your posting habits? Let’s dissect this into two parts:
- Discovery
- Renovation
DISCOVERY
There are a few different ways going about finding out that you may be turning off your fans with your social media posts.
Internally (but not exact), check on metrics like:
- Fan/Follower growth
- Engagement levels (likes, favorites, comments, shares, retweets, etc.)
- Share of Volume
- Negative Feedback (Facebook)
Expanding on Share of Volume, we use Sprout Social as our dashboard of choice to help us understand brand terms and trends around those terms (including competitors).
Here’s an example:
We can easily gauge which campaigns, hashtags, keywords and competitors are performing well or may very well be annoying!
And, as a quick tip for finding your negative feedback on Facebook Pages, follow this diagram and steps:
From your Facebook Page:
- Click on Insights
- From the left-hand menu, click Posts
- Click All Posts Published and the down arrow
- Select “Post Hides, Hides of All Posts, Reports of Spam, …”
You can see in our big green box where these stats are … the little red boxes denote posts with negative feedback.
While you have to take this feedback with a grain of salt, if you see a lot of negative feedback for your number of fans or Reach, you may just be annoying!
Externally (and more exact) you can also perform audits with your audience by:
- Performing on-site surveys or asking what posts they’d like to see more of/less of
- Sending a survey by email
- Interviewing your biggest fans (on or offline)
Now that you know how to look for exasperating posts, let’s talk about ways to fix them!
Avoiding Annoying Social Media Posts
Avoiding annoying social media posts take renovation, reconstruction, or a makeover of what your current posting calendar looks like.
RENOVATION
I think the answer to fixing annoying posts is obvious; give readers what they’re looking for.
These 3 tips can help you write better social media posts.
- Know what your audience is talking about in your industry. What are the “hot” topics? Pain points?
- Hone in on engaged readers. Look at posts on your pages (or other industry partners/competitors) and see which ones have the most comments.
- Understand your content/posting metrics. And use them to decipher which kinds of content performs best; start tracking your seesaw data.
To correct annoying social media posts, you should also consider recycled content.
According to the Sprout Index:
“Most people have to see a product or service 2-4 times on social before they purchase it. And nearly 20% of people need to see a social post or advertisement 5-8 times. Purchasing decisions prompted by social take time.”
[Image: Sprout Social Q3 2016 Index]
Posting to social media is a delicate balance of informing and entertaining your potential customers. And then, much later, getting them to buy.
As Sprout says:
“While you want to ensure your audience sees that post a few times, you can’t hit them over the head with promotions for fear they’ll click that unfollow button. Because our survey found that 57% of people are more likely to buy from a brand that they follow on social, you’ll want to keep those followers.”
Over To You
What do you find to be most annoying on social media? And if you’re a marketer, what do you do track and revamp annoying social media posts? We’d love to hear from you
We’d love to hear from you; leave us a comment below!
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