5 Huge reasons why people unfollow & unfriend your brand

20 November 2017

Posting too frequently

If you flood your audience with posts, you will irritate them. Remember that you do not need to share every single tiny detail with your audience. In your attempt to stir up interest in your brand, you may in fact achieve the opposite. How much is too much? The frequency of posts differs depending on your brand. A Restaurant may get a away with 3-5 posts a week at the most, whereas a mattress shop may be better off sticking to weekly updates, offers & insights.

A HUGE no-no is posting more than one update a day. Not only will Instagram & Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm show your posts to fewer people in an effort to stop bombarding your audience (the opposite of what you were presumably trying to achieve), those that do happen to see multiple posts from your brand in a day are more likely to unfollow you. Plan your posts by at least the day before and you will be less likely to become trigger happy – which a very good thing.

The content is repetitive and boring

There is way too much competition out there for you to consider sharing content that is repetitive or boring. You have to remain innovative on social media and there is no exception to that rule! If you post the same picture about the same special every Tuesday then you can close your eyes, focus really hard and almost hear your audience’s collective yawn along with mouse clicks & finger taps on that unfollow button. In order of importance, this is what matters to people when following brands:

1. New content with each post
2. Relevant content with each post (drop the motivational memes. Right. Now.)
3. The brand’s response rate
4. The posting frequency.

There are times that you can safely share the same post again as not all of your followers would have seen the first one. It should be ok to repeat a post (of importance) with a minimum of 4 weeks in-between. This metric is slightly different for Twitter where you can safely repost twice a day, providing you change the text of your tweet.

Excessive self-promotion is “Offensive”

That’s right people. By posting too many self-promoting or sales-ey posts you are sure to lose some of your audience. Don’t talk ONLY about yourself, your services, your products or your events. One of my favourite phrases is “Be a resource, not a sales pitch”. Provide your audience with something interesting or of value every so often.

Content is irrelevant

This one can be tricky as “relevant” content could mean different things to different people. Try and keep things relevant to your audience. Go back through your timeline and check which types of post received the most engagement and focus on giving your audience more of that. Speaking of engagement, this brings us on to the next reason.

Lack of engagement

The act of following/liking of a brand is linked to the expectation of engagement from the brand. Use your social media presence to interact with your followers or you can kiss them goodbye. That sounds harsh, however if you do not reply to comments within an average of an hour, you may be doing yourself a huge disservice. In today’s world of the Smartphone, audiences don’t appreciate, but rather expect a quick response.

Allow me to refer to a recent example where an Internet troll decided to give a very well known Jeffreys Bay restaurant a really bad review & 1 star rating. It turns out that the troll did not discuss or mention their concerns directly to the establishment during their visit and instead blasted a bad review all over local Facebook Groups and directly on the restaurant’s page. At the time of writing this blog, an entire evening & morning had passed since the scathing review was left.

The irate customer’s remarks are publicly visible and yet there is not a reply in sight…. The danger here is that some may feel that the restaurant doesn’t care, and that perhaps the reviewer may be right? Has the Restaurant indeed lost their touch? A quick reply acknowledging their concern and offering to make it right may defuse the damage caused to the brand’s reputation, however for the rest of the audience, seeing a large time gap between rating and response (or none at all) is never going to do the restaurant any favours.

This is why it is so important to practise efficient community management of your pages and engage with your audience. Doing so can be time consuming, but it is imperative that you do so. If you struggle to keep up, especially during the busier times of year, you can easily enlist the services of an affordable Social Media Marketing agency such as PortKey Solutions (or any agency you feel will represent your brand professionally) to help you stay ahead. You may just find that the fee you invest will be returned to you in other ways, and then some.