~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I run a community of more than 77,000 women in business, which means I am on the receiving end of social media marketing constantly.
Some of it is excellent. A great deal of it is doing active damage to the person sending it, and they have no idea, because nobody tells you — they just quietly decide not to deal with you.
So here’s what it looks like from this side, and what to do instead.
1. Messaging me the moment I engage
I like your post. Forty seconds later there’s a message in my inbox asking me to buy something.
That tells me the engagement wasn’t noticed, it was monitored. I’m not a person who found your post interesting, I’m a trigger in a sequence.
Instead: if someone engages with you, engage back — with them, about the thing. Reply to their comment. Look at what they do. A relationship first, and possibly a conversation about business later, when there’s a reason for one.
2. Every post is “buy from me”
If your feed is a catalogue, people stop seeing it. That’s not an opinion about taste — it’s how attention works, and how most platforms rank content.
Instead: post things that are genuinely useful or specific to your actual work. What went wrong on a job and what you learned. The answer to a question clients keep asking. Something you noticed in your industry that other people haven’t.
I’d previously have said to fill the gaps with inspirational quotes and affirmations. I’ve changed my mind entirely. There is an infinite supply of that, it’s interchangeable, and it tells people nothing about whether you’re any good at what you do. One specific thing from your own week is worth twenty quote graphics.
3. Drive-by posting
Dropping a link into a group and leaving. No introduction, no engagement, never seen again.
Group owners notice. So does everyone else, and the impression formed is that you view the room as a distribution channel rather than a place with people in it.
Instead: be in three or four groups properly rather than thirty superficially. Engage several times for every time you post something of your own. People will refer you once they know what you do — but only once they know you.
4. Adding people to groups without asking
I get added to groups I’ve never heard of regularly, and it’s genuinely overwhelming to manage.
Here’s the practical argument, beyond the manners: it doesn’t work. Someone added without consent doesn’t participate, doesn’t read, and frequently leaves annoyed. You’ve inflated a number and gained nothing.
I’ve built a group past 77,000 members and I didn’t do it this way. I asked.
Instead: message them and ask if they’d find it useful. If they say no, that’s a complete answer. A smaller group of people who chose to be there is worth vastly more than a large one full of people who didn’t.
5. Chasing likes for their own sake
Like ladders, follow-for-follow, engagement pods. All of it produces numbers attached to people with no interest in what you do.
A page with two thousand uninterested followers performs worse than one with two hundred interested ones, because the platform measures whether your audience responds — and an audience assembled by reciprocal obligation doesn’t.
Instead: quality over quantity, genuinely. Post things your actual buyers would find useful and let the numbers follow slowly.
The mistake underneath all five
Each of these treats attention as something you’re entitled to take.
The message, the group add, the drive-by link, the reciprocal like — all of them extract a small amount of someone’s attention without offering anything. Done once it’s forgettable. Done as a system it produces a reputation, and the reputation is the opposite of the one you’re trying to build.
The alternative isn’t complicated. Be useful in public, repeatedly, to people you’re not currently selling to. It’s slower, it works, and it has the considerable advantage of not making you someone people avoid.
The test
Before any of it, ask: would I be comfortable if the person could see exactly why I’m doing this?
If you’re messaging because you’re genuinely interested, fine. If you’re messaging because they triggered a rule, they will work that out, and much faster than you’d expect.
Focus on creating and sharing things worth reading. The followers arrive afterwards, and they’re the right ones.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
