23 Social Media And Digital Marketing Best Practices That Are Actually Myths

When you are new to the game and have not your path to suc­cess (yet), you prob­a­bly hop from one piece of infor­ma­tion to the next, suck­ing up all the tips, social media best prac­tices and suc­cess stories.

The prob­lem is that there is some hor­ri­ble, out­dat­ed and often sim­ply wrong advice still float­ing around. And for a new­bie with­out any expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge it is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out which tips are legit – and which tips will at best get you nowhere – at worst the tips will hurt your blog, busi­ness, and marketing.

We have been there; we got some bad tips for our mar­ket­ing – we tried some, ditched more. And to help you even more, here are some com­mon myths about online and social media mar­ket­ing that you should bet­ter ignore:

1. Post once a day – or week

Many peo­ple are sooo afraid to post too often that they kill all chances of social media suc­cess long before they got going. They post so sel­dom that their fans and fol­low­ers have a hard time remem­ber­ing who they were and how they met before they get the next update.

The truth is: Most peo­ple don’t post enough on social media. For Face­book once a day is rather the min­i­mum than the max­i­mum, for Twit­ter once a day is as good as not post­ing at all. Pin­ter­est best prac­tice tips range from 30 to 40 pins per day, and Insta­gram is more like: Post as often as you like as long as you have great images.

2. If you only post your own content, you are a spammer

Do you believe that? Be hon­est: If you fol­low a page on Face­book, do you fol­low the page because you love what they do and like to know more about it – or are you fol­low­ing them because you want them to give you a dai­ly news update on every­thing they can find?

Post­ing on social media is about pro­vid­ing val­ue. If you have enough valu­able con­tent and infor­ma­tion you can share, feel free to share it, even if it is your own content!

3. Never automate

While you should not blind­ly auto­mate all you can, once you under­stand what you are doing on social media, automa­tion will be a game chang­er and the key to unlock­ing social media mar­ket­ing success.

Or how do you think all the suc­cess­ful gurus post mul­ti­ple times per day on Face­book, 30 to 100 pins on Pin­ter­est, 20 – 50 tweets and sev­er­al images in Insta­gram? They use tools and auto­mate at least part of their social media activities.

4. Following other people is wrong

Hon­est­ly, how can you expect oth­er peo­ple to fol­low you if you are too afraid to make the first step and fol­low some peo­ple? It is a two-way street. You need to be will­ing to con­nect if you want oth­ers to con­nect to you.

Sim­ply keep in mind, who you want to con­nect to? Make sure that at least a large part of the peo­ple you fol­low is from your tar­get audience.

5. Following back is a must

I have been attacked on Twit­ter for not fol­low­ing some­one. Real­ly? How can that be in my inter­est to fol­low back every­one who is fol­low­ing me?

Only fol­low back peo­ple that you are inter­est­ed in – and if you fol­low peo­ple, nev­er get angry at them if they don’t fol­low you back either. Don’t take it personally.

6. Posting too often is spam

Nope. It just might not be the opti­mal fre­quen­cy. You have to watch your num­bers and fig­ure out what works best for you. Also, if you post you need to pro­vide val­ue. Don’t just post often because you think you should. If you don’t have some­thing valu­able to share, don’t post.

But if you have a ton of val­ue to share, feel free to post more often – it can well be a game chang­er and give you a boost in traffic.

7. Re-posting content is bad

Do you always tweet your con­tent once – and then nev­er again? Bad. Only a frac­tion of your fol­low­ers will have seen this one tweet. There is noth­ing wrong to tweet the con­tent again – and again. Make sure you share a large vari­ety of con­tent – but you can and should tweet your con­tent again at a dif­fer­ent time of the day.

For Face­book, it is slight­ly dif­fer­ent because their algo­rithm will know that you repeat a post you already post­ed. But even on Face­book, you can re-share con­tent that you already post­ed. And your audi­ence will love it – because most of them will either not remem­ber that you already post­ed it, or they did not even see it the first time around.

8. You shouldn’t talk about your business

Many peo­ple are afraid to talk about them­selves or their busi­ness on social media. They fear to be over­ly pro­mo­tion­al. But there is a huge dif­fer­ence between shar­ing a sto­ry and pro­mot­ing. And while you should not be too pro­mo­tion­al, there is noth­ing wrong to talk about your busi­ness – or your­self. Shar­ing your own sto­ry should be an impor­tant part of your marketing!

9. Posting great content is enough to gather an audience (fast)

This is one major myth that is killing oppor­tu­ni­ties for many young busi­ness­es and blog­gers. The hard truth is: if nobody knows you exist your con­tent will not spread – no mat­ter how great it is.

Even great key­word research will not do the trick in most cas­es. There is already so much con­tent float­ing around that there is (almost) no niche where there isn’t already a ton of con­tent float­ing around – with more back­links and a larg­er audi­ence than you have if you are just start­ing out.

Don’t sit back and wait for a mir­a­cle – take your suc­cess into your own hands and start dis­trib­ut­ing your content!

10. Rules are set in stone

So you found a set of rules that you think make sense and now you fol­low them, but unfor­tu­nate­ly, you can­not see any suc­cess? Change your strat­e­gy. In online mar­ket­ing, rules are not fixed. Things (and the net­works) change on a dai­ly basis. If some­thing was best prac­tice and worked for some­one yes­ter­day, it can still be dif­fer­ent today – or not work for your niche.

Watch your num­bers, ques­tion and test every­thing – and cre­ate your own best practices.

11. What works for others will always work for you

Do you have this one awe­some blog­ger who made it to huge suc­cess? And now you try to recre­ate every step of their suc­cess journey?

Could work – but does not have to work.

You are a dif­fer­ent per­son, you are in a dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion – and things change. How many years ago did that blog­ger start out? How many com­pe­ti­tion did he have – and much com­pe­ti­tion do you have?

Take Pin­ter­est for instance: There are still suc­cess sto­ries and best prac­tices float­ing around from blog­gers who start­ed a cou­ple of years ago BEFORE Pin­ter­est intro­duced the smart feed – nev­er ever will you get to suc­cess, if you fol­low one of these stories.

12. As a business, you can’t show personality (or humor)

Many first-time social media mar­keters try to stay very seri­ous – but truth be told, the best and often most effi­cient social media cam­paigns or strate­gies play with emo­tions. Stay­ing too seri­ous and focus­ing only on the busi­ness side often fails to trig­ger the emo­tions that turn vis­i­tors into fans or sub­scribers and fans into customers.

13. Once you have a strategy that works, you should only repeat and not change it

Good mar­ket­ing evolves. The big advan­tage of online mar­ket­ing is that you can test, inter­pret and adjust in quick suc­ces­sion. The best mar­keters are the ones that are open to change, are cre­ative and come up with new ideas and changes all the time.

Even if you found a great mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that gets you a ton of traf­fic and sales, you need to be open to change. Because the online mar­ket­ing land­scape evolves all the time.

14. Social media results aren’t measurable

There is a ton of data avail­able. Know­ing how to use that data is key to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing success!

If the social net­works or Google Ana­lyt­ics does not pro­vide you the data you need – check some social media mar­ket­ing tools. Most of them pro­vide you with awe­some ana­lyt­ics and sta­tis­tics to help you to fig­ure out exact­ly what is going on.

15. You need to be everywhere

When we start­ed out we had no clue about mar­ket­ing on any of the major social net­works. We end­ed up try­ing every­thing at once and get­ting nothing.

That changed when we fig­ured out Twit­ter. Mar­ket­ing with Twit­ter was the game chang­er for us. All it took to get our mar­ket­ing on the track to suc­cess was to find ONE social net­work that real­ly worked. If you find your one traf­fic chan­nel that you can tame and scale, some of the oth­er traf­fic chan­nels will either fall into place or be much eas­i­er to tack­le with a lit­tle cross promotion.

16. The number of followers is what counts

A while ago there was a start­up sto­ry float­ing around Berlin: They were real­ly proud of grow­ing their Face­book Page to an impres­sive num­ber of fans most­ly via adver­tis­ing. The prob­lem was that most of these fans were not inter­est­ed in what they were doing, the Fan page was real­ly unre­spon­sive, the start­up was Ger­man, but the fans were most­ly from India and oth­er Asian countries.

(Sor­ry, I can­not link to the page, the start­up went out of business)

The prob­lem is that the num­ber of fans or fol­low­ers will not pay your bills if they are not tar­get­ed and engag­ing. There are many exam­ples of blogs, busi­ness or even peo­ple win­ning big with social media but they don’t have so many fans.

When we were still run­ning our start­up, we start­ed see­ing mea­sur­able results from Twit­ter when we only had a cou­ple of thou­sand fol­low­ers. And on net­works like Pin­ter­est, the num­ber of fol­low­ers is even less impor­tant because many peo­ple find con­tent via the search function.

17. You always have to be on the cutting edge and follow the hype

A while ago in a work­shop, one of the par­tic­i­pants asked us why we are not doing more with video on Face­book. After all, video is the BIG thing right now.

The rea­son is sim­ple, cre­at­ing video con­tent is a lot of work, We already have big-time mar­ket­ing suc­cess with­out going for video. And maybe video is not so much our thing – we are more like writers.

Our blog, our sub­scriber list and the list of cus­tomers are still grow­ing. Because we have a ton of traf­fic from oth­er chan­nels like Twit­ter and Google – for us it is a sim­ple equa­tion: We don’t want and need to invest the effort into cre­at­ing a ton of videos for Face­book. For some­one else who loves videos that might be a total­ly dif­fer­ent story.

18. Twitter is dead

Do I real­ly need to answer that? Twit­ter has mil­lions of active users; Twit­ter is grow­ing. Twit­ter just is not as good as Face­book and Insta­gram at mak­ing their users pay for success…

Did you know that there are some straight-for­ward process­es that can help you and almost any oth­er blog or busi­ness help to grow an audi­ence from Twit­ter – no adver­tis­ing involved. There are many blogs – includ­ing our The Social Ms blog and Jeff Bul­las – who built their traf­fic with Twit­ter. A large part of our traf­fic still comes from Twit­ter, and it is not going dying down.

19. Pinterest is for women and DIY only

That is so total­ly wrong. Over 175 mil­lions of peo­ple are active on Pin­ter­est, and a lot of men are start­ing to dis­cov­er the pow­er of Pin­ter­est, too. While there may be some nich­es where it is eas­i­er to unlock the full pow­er of Pin­ter­est it is not that oth­er nich­es are not present on Pinterest.

20. Pinterest is purely social (Search)

The truth is that if you are look­ing to dri­ve traf­fic to a web­site from Pin­ter­est, you should con­sid­er the search func­tion of Pin­ter­est and do some sort of SEO for your pins. This way not only your fol­low­ers will be able to see your pins, but you can also unlock the tremen­dous pow­er of the Pin­ter­est smart feed and search.

21. Pinterest is a search engine

While SEO for Pin­ter­est should be a must, not con­sid­er­ing the social aspect of Pin­ter­est is also wrong. The smart feed is strong­ly based on mul­ti­ple fac­tors. And one of these fac­tors is who is fol­low­ing who and who is shar­ing your content.

Pin­ter­est recent­ly took a major step towards some of the social media func­tion­al­i­ty by (re-)introducing hash­tags. If you want to unlock the full pow­er of Pin­ter­est, you should now also look into hash­tags (That is new as of Octo­ber 2017).

22. Niche forums are dead

Most peo­ple today look for big-time traf­fic from the major social net­works or Google search. But for many nich­es, it would be much eas­i­er to see first results quick­ly by going through niche forums. These can be on-top­ic Face­book groups or LinkedIn Groups but also spe­cial inter­est niche forums on very tar­get­ed topics.

Since tar­get­ing on them is often much bet­ter than you can do on the BIG out­lets, you can often see bet­ter results, build valu­able con­nec­tions and have a lot more fun by talk­ing to peo­ple that share your interests.

23. Email marketing isn’t social

Many peo­ple see email mar­ket­ing as some­thing imper­son­al or rather a shout –out medi­um. That is not how it should be.

Good email mar­ket­ing is your chance to con­nect and build a rela­tion­ship with your audi­ence. You have the chance to start a con­ver­sa­tion, have more than one point of con­tact and build trust.

You can often con­nect via email much bet­ter than with loose con­tact in social media. That is a chance that many blog­gers, mar­keters and busi­ness own­ers are missing.

Final words on social media myths

These are just a few of the mis­con­cep­tions and mis­takes we have encoun­tered through­out our mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty. I am fair­ly sure there a lot more myths float­ing around and mis­lead­ing some of the more inex­pe­ri­enced blog­gers and marketers.

Which social media myths have you encoun­tered? Which mis­takes have you made due to mis­lead­ing advice?

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