A Few Social Media Annoyances of Late

As you all well know, I absolutely love social media. Despite working all day, I keep Twitter and Facebook opened in the background and I check my LinkedIN account roughly every other day. It's nice to easily keep in touch with friends and get all my sports scores when I can't be in front of the game. But lately, I've been getting slightly annoyed.

If anyone can explain the following phenomenons to me, I'd greatly appreciate it:

1) Posting the SAME thing to your FB, Twitter, and LinkedIN accounts... ALL of the time! Okay, I maybe get FB and Twitter, if you primarily use Twitter to talk to friends. But ultimately this floods my news feed with things I've already read and it doesn't always make a lot of sense in the context of FB. And last I checked, wasn't LinkedIN primarily about job networking? Yeah, that's what I thought.

2) The boyfriend/girlfriend who love to tweet each other. Haven't you heard of txting? It's the same 140 characters of puppy love dribble - only it's PRIVATE. You could also consider checking out the DM feature. Trust me, I'm happy for you, but I don't need your relationship playing out on my TweetDeck. That's not to say you shouldn't ever mention your significant other, I certainly do from time to time; all I'm saying is that you don't need to have a full length conversation via tweet.

3) Tweeting over 140 characters and then continuing in a second tweet. I like that Twitter forces me to be concise - that's actually a very difficult skill to master. If you can't keep it under the limit - try posting through a 3rd party application such as Tumblr or even Facebook. It's not that I don't love hearing from you, but when you are the ONLY person I can see on the screen, well, I just think that's a little crazy!

4) People who over-promote trending topics. Yes, they are obviously popular points but no, you don't need to talk about them all day! Just because you can think of 100 different things to say about #LadyGaGa doesn't mean you have to post them! I will make an exception for sports here, as I like getting updates.

5) Companies who post too often. I think social media is really key for businesses - it's a great way to reach a large (and young) audience all at once. I do this myself for my internship and the company I work for full time also uses Twitter and Facebook to promote. When it's done well, it's great! When it's done poorly, it's a disaster. Companies that send out the same Tweet over and over are just annoying - spice it up a bit! It feels a lot less personal and lot like spam, which I am sure is not their intent. I like to try to make as many personal connections with @STAConsignment followers as I can and I try not to spam them with facts. You don't want to beg for business, it looks desperate. Instead you want to build an audience and keep them up to date on what's going on in the company.