Enough With the Social Media Spamming

Let’s get something straight here. You will instantly tarnish your social media reputation—or at the very least annoy hundreds if not thousands of people—if you send everyone who follows you on Twitter a boilerplate pitch for your services.

Everyone who follows advertising, marketing and digital content specialists on Twitter has experienced this. “Thanks for the follow!” reads a typical message. “To get our free e-book on the latest SEO strategies, sign up for our weekly newsletter. No spam, we promise.”

That is almost word-for-word a message we received last week after following what appeared to be an interesting Twitter feed. The sender broke the no-spam promise right there in the message. Because make no mistake. An automatic Twitter message to every one of your followers is considered spam by just about everybody who reads it.

All of us who manage social media accounts in the marketing and advertising business routinely encounters this. Bruce Weinstein at Forbes says he immediately removes his connections with everybody who does it. He quotes Phil Gerbyshak, Vengreso.com’s chief digital officer. “Connect first, pitch last. Instead of pitching me, find me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, and comment genuinely on something I’ve shared or commented on not super recently via email. Offer a real insight or even disagree respectfully with me.”

Most of us have established relationships of some kind with people we first met on the Internet. Sometimes they become clients, other times employers or employees. They often become friends, and once in a while, they become spouses. Virtually none of these initially web-based relationships begin with some kind of a spam message.

No one is interested in hiring the first individual or company who spams them on social media. Feel free to promote your business, your services and your e-books on the Internet. Some of us might even be interested, but, if we are, our interest will be ignited organically. If you want to establish a business relationship with someone, start by interacting with them online like a real human being. It’s more time consuming, sure, but it’s also authentic and is far more likely to lead somewhere productive.