Curious as to how you’re doing with social media? Check out our list to make sure you’re not making any of these top six mistakes.

1.     Posting political point of views as the company / business page. Don’t mix business with politics over social media. You’re bound to offend a portion of your audience or customer base which could lead to lack of sales, revenue, etc. If you must vent about politics, do so on your personal page (and we recommend not having your personal connected to your professional page or audience if that is the case).

2.     Using graphics that aren’t professional. Who doesn’t like to draw something in Microsoft Paint? However, if your company needs an illustration, hire a graphic designer or service to create professional graphic tools. This will create a much better audience reach and appearance than trying to do it yourself.

3.     Posting too many messages. We once had a client who had a sale coming to a close at the end of a month. They decided to blast the identical sales message on all their social media platforms every hour, for six hours. It was ineffective for their sales, but it made their social media page look manic. Instead, come up with varying, clever, resourceful messaging if you must post to that degree; however, we caution to not post that frequent on a business page.

4.     Not utilizing a variety of social platforms. We have seen a customer who only wanted to utilize Facebook. However, in analyzing their audience, it was clear they could benefit from other social media platforms. Go ahead and be adventurous and test the waters.

5.     Ranting about a poor customer review. We’ve seen a company take to their social media page to blast a person who left an unfavorable customer review. They went on about their review appearing to be insulting the individual, their intelligence, and so on. We really recommend handling a response professionally and to the individual personally over direct message than blasting as a public message. It actually made me personally no longer like the brand as much.

6.     Posting too many personal photos of behavior that doesn’t align with the brand. A company page is just that. When a social media marketer decides to take their own twist on things and add photos of them to spark a sense of ‘celebrity’ or popularity is where things can go awry. In this case, the social media marketer was posting photos of them engaging in behaviors that didn’t line up well with the health brand. Within a few weeks, it was noticed and the person no longer was employed or no longer made such posts.

7. Setting and forgetting. Scheduling posts out in the future is a social media marketer’s dream. We finally are able to think ahead and strategically, too. One big mistake can happen through this however. When you ‘set and forget’ in terms of social media, you run the risk of not being responsive to real-time news or information. With the terrible and absolutely tragic mass-shooting in Vegas, for example, one company still had a promotion on that day (and the next few days) about a fun trip to Vegas. It is our opinion they should have altered the timetable on their social media and postponed posts about winning a trip to Vegas to demonstrate sensitivity to the tragic loss.