SOCIAL MEDIA ETIQUITTE

Social media etiquette refers to the guidelines that companies and

individuals use to preserve their reputation online.

As social media channels have evolved to become one of the primary ways
people communicate in the modern world on a daily basis, typical social
rules are finding their way into digital environments.

Just as social etiquette dictates how people behave around others in the
real world, social media etiquette revolves around online guidelines to
follow.

The basics of social media etiquette

The demands of social media etiquette differ from one platform to the next.
For example, reposting someone’s content on Instagram requires much
more care than retweeting someone on Twitter.

Social media etiquette refers to both the spoken and unspoken set of social
conventional rules of personal and business behavior online. It dictates how
people conduct themselves on social media so they remain respectful and
respectable.

Bad social media etiquette on your personal account will probably leave
you with posts that make your future self cringe. But for businesses, it could
affect their brand reputation and can deter customers from returning.

That’s why we’ll provide you with the best dos and don’ts to maintain
proper social media etiquette for your business and why it’s important.

Why is social media etiquette important?

With an increasingly vigilant internet population, a single mistake on social

media can make or break a business.

Outlining proper social media etiquette in your social media policy will

help you:
 Protect against legal and security issues: If your industry has
stringent privacy and compliance laws, your system will keep you on
the right side of the regulations.
  Protect against privacy risks: Social media etiquette outlines what’s
acceptable to share and what isn’t. This helps prevent privacy
violations for your business and for others.
 Empower staff: When your employees know how to share content
safely online, they can represent and advocate for your organization,
without harming your reputation.
 Defend your brand: Social media etiquette ensures that everyone
who interacts with your brand on social media will see a respectable,
professional business.

1. Understand Each Platform’s Best Practices

2. Don’t Be Overly Promotional
3. Monitor Posts Frequently
5. Be Responsive; Not Reactive
6. Don’t Force a Connection
7. Don’t Beg for (or Buy) Followers
8. Remember Humor Isn’t Universal
9. Play Nice with Competitors
10. Give Credit to Sources
11. Build a Positive Image

On the flip side, there are some basic dos and don’ts that essentially apply
to all platforms:

 Avoid over-automation. While scheduling your posts in advance

and automating analytics is helpful, don’t automate everything. Some
things still need a human touch.
 Handle your hashtags carefully. Avoid using too many hashtags at
once. Even on Instagram, where you can use 30 hashtags in a single
caption, it’s important not to overdo it.
 Don’t bad-mouth your competition. Don’t be petty. Saying
negative things about your competitors online will harm your
reputation more than it hurts theirs.
 Be authentic and genuine. Don’t try to be something you’re not.
Remember that your customers can learn whatever they need to
 know about your brand online today and things like authenticity can
definitely go a long way.

Why is social media etiquette important?

Social media etiquette is often baked into the rules of a social media
policy for modern brands. This policy usually shares a complete code of
conduct for anyone who interacts with a social channel:
 Protect against legal and security issues. If you exist in an industry
with stringent privacy and compliance laws, your system will keep you
on the right side of the regulations.
 Empower staff. When your employees know how to share content
safely online, they can represent and advocate for your organization,
without harming your reputation.
 Defend your brand. Social etiquette ensures that everyone who
interacts with your brand on social media will see a respectable,
professional business.

SOCIAL MEDIA PRIVACY

How to Protect Your Privacy on Social Media

Here’re some tips to help you protect your privacy on social
media:

1. Read and Understand the Privacy Terms

Every website on the internet has privacy terms, including
social media sites.

Before signing into any social media and registering an

account, it is important that you read and understand their
privacy terms.
Pay particular attention to the privacy terms of the information
you are registering and agreeing to share when you sign up
for an account with a social media platform.

For instance, what content can be shared with the third party,
can you delete your content on the website permanently.

2. Site Features
Ensure you familiarize yourself with the social media site’s
functionality before you broadcast or share any messages.

Understand who will see your messages and whether they’ll

be only specified recipients or all users on the platform.

Above all, understand the privacy settings and privacy

vulnerabilities on the social media site.

3. Adjust your Privacy Settings

For every social media platform you are using, always check
the default privacy settings on their site.

Most default privacy settings on social media may permit the

sharing of your information with other third-party online users.

Adjusting the default privacy settings may limit the amount of

information that the social media site can share with other
users outside of your knowledge.

4. Biographical Information
To register an account with many social media platforms,
you’ll be required to provide your biographical information
such as full name, year of birth, age, or address.

Keep these pieces of information to yourself to limit what

other social media users know about you. Such information
can provide cybercriminals with enough data to cause you
harm.

You may consider customizing the privacy settings on your

media to minimize personal information on the same platform.

5. Account Information
Consider carefully the kind of personal detail you provide on
your social media profile.

Never provide sensitive information such as nearest schools,

political affiliation, bank account information, former or current
workplace, Social Security numbers, or general interests,
among others.

Providing this information may appear harmless, but it can be

used to scam you or serve you unnecessary ads.

6. Friends or Contacts
You don’t have any obligation to accept a “friend or follow”
request of anyone on social media, particularly those you do
not know.

Be careful when accepting friends or following friends or

contacts with a keen consideration of why you are using the
site.

Before accepting any follow or friend request, research about

the person, and understand (from their timeline) who they
are, what they do, and what kind of content they share.

7. Turn Off Your Location

While adjusting your privacy settings, never forget to turn off
your gadget’s location sharing.
This way, you’ll avoid giving reviews to places and
businesses you frequently visit. Turning off your location
prevents your Facebook, email, and Phone Lookup.

8. Be careful about posting photos online

Before you post any photos, think twice. Posting photos on
social media has been identified as one of the risky social
networking activities.

For instance, a simple, harmless picture of your child without

a name may already be revealing too much information.

Advertising your whereabouts through pictures could make

you, your loved ones, or your home a tempting target for
cybercriminals.

9. Avoid Clickbait
No social media will take responsibility for third-party apps.

When prompted to ‘comment below to see magic’ or ‘check

which celebrity you share a birthday with,’ avoid clicking
these random baits.

They are third-party apps that try to capture and misuse your
private information.

Security Tips for Privacy on Social Media

As with all web-based accounts, you need to counter the lack
of privacy on social media by taking precautions to secure
your privacy and account information. Here are a few security
tips:

Choose a “strong,” secure password.

Use different passwords on all your different social media
accounts.
Change your passwords frequently.
Avoid logging into public computers or using friends’
phones to log in to your social media accounts.
Use caution with public wireless connections when
accessing your social media accounts. If possible, use a
VPN.
Avoid using public or shared devices to access your social
media accounts.
Avoid clicking on social media links, even the ones sent to
you by a friend.
Secure your devices with password protection to protect
your social media and other information in case they are
stolen or lost.

Wrapping Up
In the future, social media apps may partly be required to
protect their user’s privacy and keep them safe.

But until then, there are steps you can take to protect your
own privacy.

By using a VPN, you can help secure your data and limit the
amount of information that companies can mine from your
browsing habits.

Enjoy fast and private access to the internet while protecting

your personal social media accounts just by connecting
through a VPN.

There are websites where you can get some handy tips that

can help you protect your privacy on social media.
Ads and popups that know too much
Advertisers are pouring a lot of money into their ad campaigns on social media, so
it’s only natural that they should want to target their ideal customers as accurately as
possible. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram provide specialized
advertisement tools, solutions, and dashboards that allow marketers to maximize
their advertising dollars as much as possible.

This kind of hyper-targeting has its benefits and drawbacks, of course. For one,
customers are increasingly using ad blockers to counteract intrusive ads and
popups. The same goes for the mobile audience, as customers are encouraged
more and more to use an ad blocker for android or a similar solution for iOS devices
to prevent intrusive ads from popping up on every website.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t invest in social media ads, but you need to
keep in mind that running too many campaigns can backfire easily. If your chosen
social networks are increasingly mining data to boost your ad campaigns, it’s
important that you educate your audience on how they can opt out of third-party
cookies and protect their data.

Yes, it is important to target the right people, but you don’t want your ads to turn your
followers against you - after all, people don’t like ads that seem to “know” too much.

Identity theft and impersonation

Another very real privacy threat on social media nowadays is identity theft and
impersonation. Securing consumer identity is paramount for modern businesses, and
that also means educating your audience on how to stay safe online and avoid
identity theft. This is especially important for companies operating in high-risk
industries where identity theft or impersonation might be a more common
occurrence.
If you don’t have a reason to educate your audience, then you should focus on
educating your employees on how to protect themselves on social platforms - in
order to protect your business. For example, someone might try to steal their image
to impersonate them, either for personal purposes or with malicious intent, which can
lead to data breaches.

Make sure to help your employees avoid identity theft by boosting their social media
security, leveraging safe logins, and educating them on phishing scams, suspicious
links, and more.

By the way, bad actors can steal your company’s product photos as well in an
attempt to impersonate your brand. This related theft often violates copyright laws,
so it benefits you to learn about the rules for taking photos from the internet . You
want to protect your brand as well as your customers and employees.
Unsecure logins via social media
Nowadays, many websites allow you to log in or create an account simply by
connecting your social media account, which is convenient, but it can create various
security risks. What companies can do here to keep their customers safe and offer a
seamless experience is to use a tool like social Login to provide a safe login with a
social media ID. This will also allow you to seamlessly gather profile data without
exposing the user to any risk.
Enabling users to connect with your website, app, or software solution via their social
accounts is a great way to boost your social media marketing strategy as a whole,
but it is imperative to do it through a unified social API in order to ensure data
security and privacy protection. This also allows you to instill trust in your social
followers by showing them that logging in with their social accounts is safer than ever
before.

Data mining and IP tracking

Social networks are notorious for their attempts to mine data and sell it to third-party
companies. Every time you create an account on a social network, you willingly
relinquish some of your personal data, such as your name, address, occupation, and
more. However, companies also tend to mine for more specific data, such as
behavioral trends, social contacts and interactions, and various personal interests.

If you want to elevate your privacy and prevent companies from tracking you around
the web, you might want to secure your business with a VPN. There’s no denying
that antivirus and VPNs can dramatically improve your security in the online world,
and a VPN can ensure your privacy while shopping, banking, and surfing online.

These tools are great for companies as well as individuals, particularly on dubious
social networks like Facebook that have already come under fire for their data mining
and data reselling activities over the years.

Bots and botnet attacks

Bots are automated social media accounts used to spam people, send out malicious
links, and perform all kinds of malicious activities. When these bots are grouped
together, they become a bot network, or a botnet, which can launch DDoS attacks
and enable cyber criminals to access accounts and devices.

It should go without saying that this can be disastrous for your company, which is
why it’s important to leverage consumer authentication and other advanced security
solutions to protect your employees and customers on social media. Bots and
botnets will continue to operate on social networks, but you can use cybersecurity
solutions and built-in security features on social media to keep your accounts safe.
 Make sure to:

 Use two-factor authentication

 Use account authentication

 Use strong passwords

 Use a social media management platform

 Delete old and unused accounts

 Conduct security audits

 Manage access for all employees

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of identifying and determining what is

being said about a brand, individual or product through different social and
online channels.

Why is social media monitoring

important?
When brands use social media monitoring, they can do the following things.

 Analyze direct mentions of a brand. You can collect direct @mentions across
social media to easily react to customer behavior and deliver value at the right time.
 Analyze indirect mentions. You can see public messages and comments from all
around the web that only include a variation of your brand’s name, with no hashtags
whatsoever. This allows you to understand the context.
 Spend less time on manual data collection. If you analyze brand mentions across
all social media where your business is present, you will probably have to switch
between many apps and manually search for mentions to stay on top of it. Social
media monitoring tools (which we will discuss later in the article) allow companies to
automate this time-consuming process.
 Improve customer care strategies. It can lead to faster response times,
prevent public relations issues and identify brand advocates. Improving
your customer care strategy increases customer loyalty and brand awareness.
 Improve overall marketing strategy. Insights gained from social media monitoring
help brands improve relationships with potential customers and quickly respond to
their behavior, reactions, needs, pain points, and desires. This data can be used later
 for strengthening your communication, improving content quality and selling
strategies.
Let’s find out the benefits of using social media monitoring.

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring helps companies get the idea of their company's public
perception, which allows them to:

 react to consumers’ behavior on social platforms in real time;

 determine how certain demographics feel about your brand;
 use positive feedback as a social proof in your strategy;
 use negative feedback to solve issues at any buyer’s journey stage;
 build brand credibility and authenticity;
 eliminate channels with the lowest engagement levels to save money and effort;
 analyze performance of different social media marketing campaigns;
 calculate return on investment through advanced reporting capabilities.
Let’s discover the principles according to which social media monitoring works.

How does social media monitoring

work?
Social media monitoring works similar to search engines like Google and Bing. The
robot crawls social media platforms in search of predefined keywords. This activity is
completely legal and compliant with GDPR laws.

No matter what tool you choose, there are three key processes in social media
monitoring:

1. Setting-up. First of all, you need to set up a project where you list the keywords you
want to track across the internet and social media. It can be your brand’s name,
product names and combinations of both. An advanced setup may require excluded
keywords to make an even more specific inquiry.
2. Collecting. The tool collects mentions into a dashboard report. It usually offers
plenty of filters to clean up, group, mark and delete collected mentions. Social media
monitoring tool also allows you to receive mentions directly to your inbox in a format
of real-time, daily, and weekly reports.
3. Analyzing. Data analysis varies between different tools. Some tools focus on
volume, engagement and reach metrics, the others — on sentiment and influence of
social media mentions.
How does it work?

Similar to search engines that send crawlers to the far reaches of the Internet,
social media monitoring is an algorithm-based tool that crawls sites and
continuously indexes them. Once sites are indexed, they can be searched
based on queries or strings.

How does it affect ecommerce businesses?

Social media listening can impact how you market your ecommerce business.
Businesses engaged in social monitoring actively search digital media
channels for keywords or phrases directly related to their brands.

Once you have an idea of your company's public perception, you can:

 React in real time with consumers on social platforms

 Determine how certain demographics feel about your brand
 Use positive feedback in marketing, etc.
 Use negative feedback to correct errors in your business
 Build brand credibility and authenticity
 Refine marketing spend by eliminating channels with the lowest or worst
engagement levels
 See which social media marketing campaigns are performing the best and
the worst
 Calculate return on investment through advanced reporting capabilities

Social media monitoring can give you a glimpse into what's being said about
your brand in real time, gathering publicly available data and organizing it in a
way that works to your advantage. Social monitoring tools can also help you
grow your online awareness for your ecommerce store. You can act on what's
being said about your company and in turn, reconnect with prospective
customers using the same social channels.

Top Social Media Metrics to Monitor:

1. Number of Social Media Followers

2. Impressions and Reach

3. Engagement

4. Volume and Sentiment

 5. Top Influencers

6. Response Rate and Time

7. Top Engaging Social Channels

8. Conversions

9. Social Channels Revenue

Best Social Media Tools to Track Your Metrics:

1. Keyhole

2. Sprout Social

3. BuzzSumo

4. BrandWatch

5. Google Analytics

Table of Contents [hide]

 Top Social Media Metrics to Monitor 

o 1. Number of Social Media Followers
o 2. Impressions and Reach
o 3. Engagement
o 4. Volume and Sentiment
o 5. Top Influencers
o 6. Response Rate and Time
o 7. Top Engaging Social Channels
o 8. Conversions
o 9. Social Channels Revenue
 Best Social Media Tools to Track Your Metrics
o 1. Keyhole
o 2. Sprout Social
o 3. BuzzSumo
o 4. BrandWatch
o 5. Google Analytics
 Final Thoughts

Top Social Media Metrics to Monitor 

1. Number of Social Media Followers
Number of social media followers is one of the many metrics that many marketers tend to

dismiss as a vanity metric. 

Having engaged followers is more important than having many followers.

However, if one of your goals is to increase your social media following or brand reach,

then you need to know how many followers you have.  

When working to increase your brand reach, it’s important to know how many social

followers you have managed to gather over time. 

You may find out that some of your accounts are doing better than others. You want to focus

more on the ones that are attracting more audiences than the ones that aren’t. 

Another way to approach social media followers is to look at follower growth rate over

time.

Are your followers growing or are you losing followers? By examining the follower growth

rate, you’ll be able to identify any trends in your growth.

Having a consistent growth rate over several months will help you justify the effort and

dedication you’ve put in.

Again, the follower growth rate will help you single out faster-growing profiles so that you

can cut the cord on profiles that remain stagnant, or identify which social profiles need a little

bit more love.

Most social media profiles will show you your follower count in their analytics section.

You can use a simple spreadsheet to monitor your follower growth each month. 
2. Impressions and Reach
If you’re interested in increasing brand awareness and perception, then reach and impressions

should be in your social media analytics report. 

Reach refers to the number of unique social media users who have seen your content. It

indicates how viral your content has gone. 

Impressions, on the other hand, show the number of times a post shows up in a social media

user’s timeline.

Impressions give you insight on the number of people who saw your posts even if they didn’t

click, comment, or engage with that post in any other way.

The biggest difference between impression and reach metrics is that impressions measure

the total number of times your content is seen by the audience.

Reach, on the other hand, is the number of people actually seeing your content. 

So, why are these metrics important? 

Impressions and reach indicate how your social media engagement is doing. When your

impressions and reach are low, it’ll result in a lower engagement rate, since there’s fewer

people seeing your post.

If this is the case, then you need to look at your content and make sure that it’s being received

well by your audience. 

Another thing that you need to look at is your target audience. Are you targetting the right

audience?

3. Engagement
Engagement is what will prevent you from losing your social media followers. Engagement

allows you to see how your social media efforts are resonating with your followers. 

There are a few engagement metrics that you need to monitor: 

 Likes, Comments, Retweets, Shares etc.: How many people like, comment on, retweet or
share your content?

 Post Engagement rate: (# of likes and comments / # of followers) x 100. The higher the rate
the more the love your content is receiving.

 Click Through Rate (CTR): # of clicks / # of impressions. CTR measures the number of people
who click your link after seeing your post.

 Account Mentions: Monitor how many times your brand has been mentioned on social
media. Account mentions help to measure brand awareness. 

Monitoring your engagement metrics will help you know how engaged users are with your

content.

It will also give you insights on the best days and times to share your content on social media

platforms. Keyhole allows you to view account optimizations and can also tell you when the

best time to post is.

Engagement will also let you know whether users like your product or service and most

importantly when to launch new products on social media.

4. Volume and Sentiment
The volume metric indicates how much people are talking about your business or brand

online. It counts mentions.

Sentiment shows you how people feel about your brand. To measure sentiment, monitor

messages and relevant keywords online.

You can sort them into emotion-based categories such as sad, angry, and happy.

With these metrics, you get to know where you stand against your competitors when it comes

to online conversations.

In other words, you get to see how many people are talking about your brand online and how

they feel about it as compared to your competitors.

You can also choose to monitor specific keywords associated with your brand to find out

your online volume and sentiment metrics around keywords outside of your name.

Don’t forget to monitor trends associated with volume and sentiment to see what’s most often

associated with your brand. 

5. Top Influencers
Influencer marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to implement for 2020.

Influencers can help you grow your audience and increase your sales significantly. 

But how do you find the best influencers to work with?

Monitor the people talking about you online and the kind of influence they have. Monitor

who your top supporters are and encourage them to keep engaging with your brand. 
By monitoring your top influencers, it will help you know who to reach out to when creating

effective marketing campaigns.  

There are a number of good social listening tools that you can use to find your top

influencers and their influence scores. 

Remember, having a large audience does not necessarily mean an individual is influential.

Just because someone has a lot of fans and followers, does not mean they have the influence

to make them support your brand.

6. Response Rate and Time

40% of customers who share their complaint via social media expect to get a response

within one hour.

This goes to show how important customer service support on social media is important. 

Monitor your response rate and time on your social media profiles to determine whether you

need a community manager in order to improve on this metric. 

This metric will help you get insights into your overall customer service approach. You’ll

know whether you need to restructure your strategy if most of your client issues went

unresolved. 

7. Top Engaging Social Channels

One of the major goals of social media marketing is to increase web traffic. You want people

to go beyond liking your Facebook post.

You want them to visit your website and hopefully buy your product or service. 
It’s important to monitor which channels are driving the most traffic to your website. 

Beyond simple traffic, monitor what those social users do once they land on your site. Are

they engaging with your web content, or leaving straight away?

By learning how they engage with your content you will be able to improve on your web

content to make it more engaging so that you can reduce your bounce rate.

The longer users stay on your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase. 

You can track your social referral traffic in Google Analytics. 

8. Conversions
You’re on social media because you want to convert more people into your customers.

Conversions are a metric not to be overlooked.

Monitor how many people visited your website from your social media profiles and

purchased your product or service during that visit. 

If you were running an ad on social media, you also need to track how many people

converted into customers from that ad. 

You also need to monitor other important actions that your fans took such as signing up for

your weekly newsletter, downloading an app, scanning a QR code, etc. 

9. Social Channels Revenue

Do your company executives a solid by assigning a monetary value to your social

conversions. 
While it’s exciting to say that X number of people became customers following your social

media efforts, it’s even more exciting to the finance department when you can state the

amount of revenue you’ve been able to bring in. 

Use Google Analytics to set website goals for each conversion point. Add a dollar value to

each conversion.

This way you can easily calculate the revenue generated by your different sources, including

social media.

Best Social Media Tools to Track Your

Metrics
1. Keyhole

Keyhole is one of the best and most affordable social media monitoring tools available. 

Get an in-depth look at your brand’s social media health via Keyhole’s social dashboard

feature. 
You’ll be able to view metrics including total impressions, total engagements and total link

clicks.

Other metrics that you’ll find useful include: 

 Performance of keywords, URLs, topics, hashtags, and @mentions.

 Top influencers for your brand and information about their engagement rates, reach, and
more.
 Info on global conversations, topics, and influencers driving your market.
 Sentiments around your brand.
 Campaign performance on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
 Brand or keyword mentions on news, blogs and forums.
Additionally, you can use Keyhole to compare your social media accounts and campaigns

against those of major competitors.

Price: Starts at $179 USD per month. 

2. Sprout Social

Use Sprout Social to gather analytics from multiple social media accounts. 

This tool allows you to quickly compare social media metrics across multiple networks at

once from one place. 

You can see analytics from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Once you have these metrics, you can quickly use them to create presentation-ready reports

using templates and custom reporting options available.

This gives you multiple ways to not only conduct social media metric tracking but also be

able to understand these metrics and present them to others.

Price: $99 — $249 USD per month.

3. BuzzSumo

While BuzzSumo is not strictly a social media tool, it is a great tool to analyze your content

engagement. 

This awesome tool allows you to see how many times your blog post was shared on

Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. 

Use BuzzSumo to also monitor the performance of content that contains relevant industry

keywords.

This enables you to see how your content marketing campaigns are competing against the

competition.
With this tool, you are able to tell which types of posts receive the most engagement and use

this data to inform your own content strategy.

Price: $79 – $499 USD per month.

4. BrandWatch

Want to know what your customers are thinking? Use BrandWatch. 

With BrandWatch, you can collect useful metrics from social media profiles, blogs, forums,

and news/review sites. 

BrandWatch will show you the volume of your brand mentions. You can then compare it

with that of several competitors. 

Additionally, get to know what your customers think about your brand by observing the

sentiments about your brand. 

Plus, see your audience demographics and the topics they are most interested in. 
Take advantage of the data visualization tool that lets you create engaging reports by

representing data in form of graphs.

Price: There are different plans depending on the number of mentions per month.

5. Google Analytics

You’re probably using Google Analytics to monitor your web traffic. But did you know that

you can use it to monitor your most important social media metrics?

While this is not solely a social media analytics tool, it’s one of the best ways to track your

social media campaigns. 

It’s also one of the best tools to help you measure social ROI.

Price: Free