The following is a guest post by Max Greene of Muffin Marketing.
We don’t need to tell you just how powerful social media can be for your small business, but sometimes it can feel as though you’re only talking to robots. Social media spam can damage your brand’s reputation, so we’ve delved deeper into how you can avoid it.
1. Don’t automatically follow people
Automatic following on Twitter and Instagram is one of the most common social media growth technique, but that doesn’t mean it’s effective.
Using free tools or Google Chrome extensions, you can follow in bulk users who follow your competitors, which should, in turn, encourage them to follow you back.
It does work in some cases but usually, makes your business look desperate. Unless you’re prepared to risk it, we recommend steering clear of automated techniques, as they’re against the social media giant’s rules. Instagram has been especially diligent in sending cease and desist notices, most recently to the following tool Instagress.
2. Turn off commenting
If your business has fallen victim to mass spam, then a quick-fix solution is to turn off commenting temporarily. This option can be applied to your whole page or to specific posts.
Say you’re running a social media giveaway and want to ensure only genuine followers enter. In this case, you could turn off comments at peak times when you know spammers are going to be active. Failing to manage spam on competitions and giveaways can reduce trust and engagement levels, and cause users to abandon your page entirely.
If your social media management tool has moderation rules like Agorapulse, you can prevent comments with particular words from ever appearing on your Facebook and Instagram organic or paid posts.
3. Block spam accounts
See a spam account? Block it. Of course, you’ll lose a follower and it’ll take longer for you to reach your 10,000 page likes goal, but a spam account will provide no value to your business, and so there’s no need to have them on your account. Plus, if you block spam ac-counts, you’ll be less likely to miss comments and tweets from potential customers.
