Oversharing on Social Media

What’s the resistance to using social media for your company?  Another reason I have heard from clients as to why they are not using social media to enhance their business promotion, is they have encountered people who are oversharing inappropriate content on social media.

For example, they point to people are posting things about their personal life on LinkedIn, which is a very business-focused network, or people are oversharing on Facebook about all kinds of personal information. They see this as a negative, and as a reason why they want to stay as far away from social media as possible. As if using the channels to promote their businesses will somehow brand them as oversharers too.

I do need to be clear when I say inappropriate content. By this I mean people are sharing a little bit too much and getting too personal.  If the content is abusive or hateful, you can block and report the individual posting such content. There is no need to tolerate abuse.

So how do we deal with some of the more annoying oversharing that tends to happen on social networks? Is there anything we can do to stop people from oversharing?

I have to tell you that long before online social networks were invented, people were oversharing. They were oversharing at the gym, they were oversharing at the office, and they were oversharing at dinner parties. It’s part of the human condition that some of us just tend to overshare.

One strategy is to simply ignore the oversharing. We may not be able to directly stop people from oversharing, but we can control our reaction to oversharing.

If the tendency for some people to overshare is your biggest complaint about why you are not engaging on social networks for your business, I would ask you to please put that to rest and realize that human trait will always be around.

It is no reason to avoid growing your business by advertising, promoting or being active on social media. As much as oversharing may be annoying, it’s going to be present, and our best strategy is to ignore that type of content and keep building your business.

Jen Kelly is a marketing consultant in Toronto and CEO of New Initiatives Marketing Inc. (NIM) serving growing businesses in Canada and the USA. NIM is the team to call for marketing execution excellence. For companies that don’t have a marketing department, we become your marketing department. For companies that have an existing marketing team and are challenged adding capacity and skills to their team due to a head-count freeze, we act as your marketing team’s right-hand, supporting the skills needed on a monthly basis. Contact us today for a conversation about your company’s marketing needs.