Social Media Spam – Why It Doesn’t Work
Social media spam is not only annoying, it’s definitely not a productive or profitable marketing technique. Why do people keep doing it?
First, let’s understand what social media spam is. Here is what I mean:
Sending someone a friend or follow request and immediately hitting their direct message inbox with a sales pitch or invitation to a meeting. This applies to Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, etc…
I absolutely respect that someone is trying to build their business via social media. I use social media quite a bit, myself. I just don’t have any respect for folks using social media spam to do it.
What Is Social Media Spam?
If you have ever attended a networking event you have probably run across people who introduce themselves with an immediate transition to a 5 minute (or longer) speech about their amazing offer and why you need to get it now. You can look around the room and see people rolling their eyes and just waiting for this guy to stop talking.
Or imagine some guy walking in to a bar and he just starts walking around asking all the women in the bar to marry him.
This is how social media spam comes across.
Some of the worst experiences include someone sending me a request. When I get the request, I see the name of the person that sent it to me. They saw my name when they sent the request. And it starts with, “My name is (something completely different from what is shown on their profile). May I ask what is your name?”
My response: You can see that in my profile.
They say, “I am from (someplace different from their profile). Where are you from?”
My response: You can see that in my profile.
And then they give me a long clearly pre-written “resume” of how amazing they are and ask if I want to collaborate, partner, join, etc…
In addition to being annoying, this stuff just cracks me up. Sometimes I ask, “Does this EVER work for you?”. (It doesn’t.)
And this isn’t some of that, “I want to send you free money” garbage. They’re trying to pitch me on an existing business opportunity I recognize most of the time.
Another favorite is that individual who messages you from some new Instagram account asking you to message them back at their “primary” account so they can tell you about their amazing offer.
Or the Facebook Messenger that starts off with a “Hi, So glad to connect.”. We haven’t connected. And then roll into an immediate pitch.
Or sending you an offer which is completely unrelated and irrelevant to you. If you look at our profile on Instagram, you will see nothing that indicates we sell jewelry, or have pets. It’s all about digital marketing. So, when we get the pitch about how amazing we look and how incredible we’d look in their jewelry, or how much they can tell we love our little doggies … (insert eye roll here).
I think we can agree that a big motivator for any legitimate social media presence is to build business. If that is your goal, start by building value. Offer valuable (or at least relevant) content on your social media site. Let your followers get to know you a bit. As you reach out to gain followers, express some interest in them and what they do. As you go through the process of understanding the needs of your followers, you can begin to show them how you might be able to help them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.
If you start by introducing yourself and getting to know people, you may have an opportunity to build rapport and pick up customers and even some referrals.
If you just run with social media spam, you can count on being ignored, unfollowed, unfriended, and blocked.
Something we like to do is create content that provides value to our potential customers. We write articles about lead generation, email marketing, digital marketing, etc… and we will post these articles in our various social media channels.
As folks read our content, some ask for more information or more details. Daily, we have new subscribers joining our mailing list to learn more about how email marketing can help them build their business. We use our social media to feed qualified traffic to our capture pages. And it works! We see new leads coming in on a daily basis.
We get messages through our social media channels that ask us how our tools can help them build their business.
If your goal is to build a solid business by helping people or businesses solve problems, avoid the social media spam trap. Build real rapport. Build your lists. Drive real sales.
Questions? Don’t hesitate to ask in the comments!
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