Social Media Etiquette

So you've just started a social media site for your company. You've probably been using Facebook and twitter in your personal life for years, and you know how important it is to have an active online presence not just for yourself, but for your company. What many businesses seem to forget, is that the rules, so to speak, are different when you're not just representing yourself. Here are few basic etiquette rules for social media sites.

1. Use proper punctuation and grammar, even on twitter. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised (or maybe not) at how often allegedly professional accounts stop using capitals and punctuation on the internet. Even on Twitter, where you are sometimes obligated to use abbreviations simply because of the character count, and it can be tempting to just not punctuate (because every piece of punctuation counts as a character) do it anyway. If you can't say it in 140 properly punctuated and spelled characters, don't say it at all.

2. No one cares what you had for breakfast, unless you're a breakfast food company. You use your personal Facebook and twitter accounts to update your friends, families, and acquaintances on your personal life, thoughts, and feelings. Your business twitter or Facebook page is being used to update your clients on your company's life, interests and ideas. Don't mix the two. Unless your personal life and/or preferences some how directly relates to your business life (we regret to inform you that our CEO is stepping down due to an unfortunate bacon and eggs related incident this morning), your customers don't need to know about it.

3. Spam is for sandwiches, not newsfeeds. No one wants to wake up one morning to find that they're entire Facebook wall, for pages and pages, is nothing but minute by minute updates of what you had for breakfast. The same thing applies to your business accounts. Spread out your updates and vary the content. Cross platform spamming - posting the same thing to your Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn pages, is excusable, and in fact necessary, since your audiences won't be identical across the sites. Deliberately posting the same or similar things more than once in a short period of time will only serve to annoy and alienate your client base.

These are just a few basic etiquette rules to get you started. What annoys you the most about how businesses conduct themselves online? What are some of the most common etiquette mistakes you've seen? Let us know in the comments, or on our own (perfectly polite)  twitter and facebook accounts.