As everyone and their grandmothers rush to embrace Social Media, it’s fun watching companies really begin to leverage the power of the platforms. But it’s also very painful to see the missteps and mistakes that people and companies make – most of which could be avoided with a little forethought and planning. Here are some of the most common social media mistakes: Spew, Relevance, Inattention and Boredom. Each is detailed below.

Spew – no not S.P.E.W. (the society for the protection of elvish welfare – ask a Harry Potter fan), but rather spewing as in letting loose the keyboard equivalent of a verbal deluge. If you are a business and you are slapping up 4 or 5 blog entries and 25 twitter updates a day, maybe that’s too much. Let things percolate – give them space to breathe. No matter how witty and intelligent you think you are, people probably don’t want to hear from you 5 times an hour, every single hour, every single day. If you say to me: ‘this is important, read this’ – every 2 hours, I’ll begin to think you don’t really understand what important is and I’ll begin to discount what you have to say before finally tuning you out altogether. Sometimes more is actually less.

Read more at:

http://www.thommitchell.com/2010/02/19/social-media-missteps/