Don't Be a Social Media Spammer!

One of the more challenging tasks of driving your social media brand is creating awareness.  While there are many tools out there to help you along the way, and even automate many actions, your drive to make your life easier could actually lead to some fairly negative results.

For example, if you're a vlogger, there are a number of methods you might use to notify your friends and followers just what's going on in your world.  For simplicity's sake, let's take a look at how three services - YouTube, Facebook and Twitter - can work together.


YouTube includes "share" tools for most platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and even this environment, Blogger.  It's a nice service, though it sometimes lags in implementation.  In my experience, it might take several hours for a new YouTube vlog to post to Facebook.

Twitter is another great way to get the word out, if you use that service and already have followers -   but be careful!  If you're like me, your Twitter account is tied in to your Facebook account, so that your tweets post directly to your Facebook profile.  If you've already set up YouTube to post to Facebook, that's two posts serving the same purpose.   I'm sure you will agree from your own experience...duplicate posts can get annoying on Facebook.

Services like Twitterfeed.com, which allows you to feed many of your social networking services to Twitter, can, if used incorrectly, multiply the problem several times over.  You may have posted the greatest vlog known to mankind, but sending repeated messages to your Facebook wall is the social media equivalent of spam.    Luckily, Twitterfeed allows for filtering of tweets, so that only feeds that include certain key words are fed through Twitter.  If you post your video on Blogger or Wordpress, for example, it won't show up as a link in one of your tweets unless it meets the criteria.  Otherwise, you've sent yet another notification about the same old thing to your friends on Facebook.  Watch your numbers go down...

It's a tricky balance.  Automating your services makes sense and makes the social media world easier to manage.    It takes a bit of strategic thinking, though, to spread the word  -  without turning your audience off.

Tell us how you've learned to spread the word without spamming the world - comment below, or email longer responses to richcity@rlsventures.com,