Social Media 101: Do's and Don'ts

© March Oyinki 2017

Mobile devices have revolutionized digital communication, especially with the exponential growth of social media. All kinds of apps are abound, from remote access to 'jail braking' apps, and there are also a bunch of social media apps that have completely changed the way people communicate. Both the  young and elderly are caught in this web of inter-connectivity that mobile devices have provided. While this digital revolution is good for making life a lot more easy, by allowing us to reconnect and relate with love ones and friends, it comes with its down side.

Mobile phones and social media apps are so interrelated that one feels almost incomplete when your phone is without data. While social media brings joy to a lot of people, it also a reason for many deaths, broken relationships and financial loss. It is pertinent to understand the rules and guidelines of the use of social media for you to make the best use of it both in your personal life and business endeavor as well.

Here are a few tips to help you have an effective and beneficial social media experience starting with dos:

Do join the social media train: Social Media has come to stay as a form of communication both for business and personal use. Be part of the social media crave, shutting yourself out of it only complicate things. Social media has become the fastest most cost effective communication tool. Allowing you to share messages, photographs and videos with friends and customers real-time. It has effectively diminished the application of traditional communication methods such as facsimile, cable and photocopying machines, particularly for informal communication.

Do respond to friends post: Participate in discussions, mostly with people you know, be interactive. If you are cold and passive and do not like or comment on other people's post, they are more likely to ignore your own post and that may translate to poor acceptance of product promotion or advertisement.

Do connect to new friends: Building up a steady followers list allows you to touch base with your family and friends in one go. It also provides you an audience to promote your product and services particularly for those who are into business, as a cost effective advertising channel.

Do post regularly: Most social media applications work the same way as search engines. How visible your page is and are seen by your contacts, depends on you activity level. Regular but intermittent post on your page or a simple 'like' or short comment on someone else's post will greatly help to boost your online visibility and increase your marketing reach.


Do promote your company: Be your company's brand ambassador by sharing post or tagging photographs from your company's page, add your job title to your profile. Ensure you clearly mark personal posts from company posts by way of creating a group or a separate photo album for your team members or employees, or use a hashtag(#) to clearly indicate that the posts are related to the company, such as #WorkLifeBalance, #CompanyOfChoice, #DiversityMoment etc.

Provided below are a few don'ts that you need to pay particular attention to:

Do not share obscenity: Social Media gives you freedom to post any and everything under heaven, but you must know that every freedom has a limit. Just as you have freedom to share, others also have the right to decide what they receive. Keep it modest, because unlike traditional media where you have control ratings such as G: General audiences, PG: Parental guidance suggested, PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned, R: Restricted, social media has very limited or no rating controls other than your privacy settings which most people don’t even know about anyways.

Do not engage in falsehood: There is a lot of falsehood circulating in social media. Greater number of information shared in Social Media are falsified, adulterated or outright made up. There is a high prevalence of impersonation, fake personalities and fraudulent characters present in Social Media. Sharing false information will lead to distrust and eventual unfriending.

Do not allow social media suck you in: Social Media is addictive, just like any other thing about life, abuse leads to addiction and the consequences of that, in a lot of cases, are dare in private, social and business life. Ensure social media does not distract you from more important things like work and relationships. It is reasonable to maintain a balance. Spending much time on frivolities on social media, amounts to waste of money.

Do not accept strangers as friends: Do not accept a friend request just because someone sends you a friend request. Only accept people you know or have been following for some time and you have reasonable background information about.  Always do background checks of persons before accepting their friend request. Engaging such persons on a telephone or Skype conversation helps you understand the personality and disposition of that individual, as it provides both voice and face-to-face interaction. Above all, phone numbers are a verifiable form of identification that can easily be traced to their owner.

Do not be an expert in everything: The saying that “jack of all trade is a master of none” still holds sway on social media. An audience that is feed with a barrage of expert advice on varying subject matter, will easily loose their confidence on such a person. Create a personality for yourself by being focused, because, multiple personality may confuse your audience and that in turn may lead to distrust.

Do not  download unsolicited files: This is peculiar to mobile phones, especially WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, where contacts send you unsolicited large file size images and videos that are of no significance, and they come in their numbers. Opening or downloading these files, exhaust your data very fast and increases your phone bill. Delete all such files from unsolicited sources immediately you see them.
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