Are you getting tired of Facebook and the insecure and childish behavior friends exhibit on it? Facebook is the most popular social media site with over 425 million active users. And with great popularity comes some very shameful and disturbing behavior and people who look to tap into Facebook’s viral market to sell you their crappy selves or scheme your money through affiliate links and the like.
So if you happen to find yourself doing any of these top 10 irritating things on Facebook, you should look to stop doing so immediately before all of your friends look to jump ship and get rid of you. If you are losing friends on Facebook like sunflower seeds, you really need to find another approach to social media management.
1. Tagging Random People in Photos
You should quit tagging people you barely know in photos that have nothing to do with you or met at a party. It’s one thing when your buddy tags you in an unphotogenic pic, then sends it out to friends for them to laugh at. At least in this situation it’s you and your friends with the person who tagged you. But the people I’m talking about upload photos and tag as many people as they can to try and gin up as many likes as possible. This is a classic move by spammers so be cautious of anyone tries strategy out. I’ve had to call out several individuals over the years, even friends for their random tagging, and you should do the same if you suspect anyone doing this. Sending a personal message to them to stop could do the trick, but I feel like if some goofball wants to tag me in every one of his posts, he must be looking for my input so I give it to him publicly right then and there. Revenge is just a dish that is best served cold…
Worst of all… they know how picky you are about your pics and that you like to approve them before they hit the WWW. BUT, if they look good, they don’t give a flying monkey what you think They will post them and tag you anyways! Who cares if you look like a loser or cock eyed. It’s all about them! Cause they look like god!
2. Cross-Posting with Twitter
Look, we social media marketing experts understand that you are a little short on content and intelligent things to say on Facebook, but there is no need to post random stuff that no one cares about. We all post the same stuff on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, but at least have the guts to not automatically send your Twitter tweets to Facebook, because people will just mute you, dislike you, or defriend you. For one, you’ll get much less engagement posting to Facebook via any third-party app let alone Twitter which basically disregards Facebook etiquette. If you do this, it’s a clear sign you’re not really engaging with anyone on Facebook or are just too lazy to post new content manually, either way you will fail and friends and followers will keep disappearing.
3. Liking Your Own Posts
So you’ve just posted the new dog or the cutest baby pictures of your best friend. That’s cool, right? But then you go ahead and like your photo yourself. Well, we know you already like the post, aren’t you the one who just shared the thing? Besides being annoyingly repetitive, the real reason people feel the need to do this is that the action of liking the post will again show up in the streaming news ticker, giving the post even more exposure, sometimes double as much. These are typically the moves of self-proclaimed “social media gurus” or people who just feel insecure about their status posts. It’s obvious that you like your own content, you posted it yourself.
4. New Page Invites
Look, as social media marketing experts, we understand you need to create a page for your business, but do everyone else a favor and stop inviting them to your half-ass Facebook pages. Instead post interesting content to your own page, share it on your profile as well (so your friends see it), and if people are interested they will follow. There is also the new social graph that will allow others to network, who are not on your friends’ list. It’s almost not your fault, as creating a page and inviting all your friends can seem tempting, but most of your friends won’t like your page and maybe they won’t like you either and defriend you. And the ones who do like it would’ve probably found it anyways without your begging them to do so. So like the funny Oatmeal comic, don’t do this…
5. Useless App Requests
If you’re on Facebook all day playing CafeWorld and Hotelville, that should be embarrassing enough, and the last thing you should ever want to do is invite your friends and alert them to your obsessions. And I can’t even explain to you the ill feeling we get when we receive a request to join Vampire World, for example, even though we’ve already registered to be friends with some less intelligent friends who do not have a life or do not work.
Rule of thumb: Step off with the application requests! Only send the ones that are absolutely necessary, the awesomeness you’ve ever seen, etc. We don’t care, at all, what shape cocktail glass we are, we don’t want a shot, we don’t want to compare our favorite ‘Hills’ characters. No, no, and no.
6. Suggesting Friends
Please stop suggesting your friends to friend somebody else. You idea of match-maker is a bit creepy and your friend might start to question why they are friends with you. And it’s actually worse than creepy because, you see, on Facebook expert spammers pair up and start suggesting up to 50 random friends for each other. By doing this, the people they suggest will get the notification (in their friend requests) and may mistakenly think the spammers requested their friendship. In reality, the spammers want you to commit the first step by adding them as friends (essentially tricking you to accept them as a friend). Facebook penalizes people for requesting too many friends, but spammers who pair up and suggest friends for each other escape notice since they are not actually doing the requesting.
7. Adding People to Random Groups
This one’s a big pet peeve of ours and we’ve seen it happen quite often. A classic text-book spam artist move, people will add you to random groups without your knowledge and all of a sudden you’re getting every single notification for each posts to the group. If this happens to you, make sure to leave the group or at least turn off the notifications within the group setting, as well as question the friendship with the culprit who added you. You don’t want to be the person known for doing this on Facebook, it’s a huge warning sign that you will lose friends.
8. Off-base and Mass Messages
Stop sending mass messages with dozens of people attached. You’ve seen these before, like “please like my page” or “vote for me in this ridiculous award I can’t win,” etc. People loathe being addressed this way, and if you really have something to say at the very least personalize your message to each individual or, just try not to send out mass messages altogether. After all, it’s straight out of the guide to spamming.
Mass emails can lead to fights and this is maybe the single worst thing you or your business can do on Facebook and will make you look bad. If somebody posts something negative on your message board, try to react professionally and if you can’t handle it this way, try a more personal approach, but definitely not on Facebook.
9. Unnecessarily Inviting People to Events
We are honored you want me to come to your poetry reading in Siberia, but we’re not quite sure we will be able to make it. When you send mass requests to a bunch of people you don’t really know, it makes it seem like you are inconsiderate and they will paint a picture of you as a spammer.
10. Abusing Like Buttons
Somehow I’ve ventured over to your blog only to be greeted by an alarming pop-up Facebook “like” box baiting me to like your page. And then, when that goes away, I can barely even see your blog post because of the 100 “like” buttons strategically placed throughout your site.
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