By You know it’s not scalable, but you do it anyway. You email your friends, “Hey, I just posted this thing on LinkedIn. Would you mind resharing it with your network?”
Friend, some tough love: This has got to stop.
It’s not that you shouldn’t ask for support. It’s not about reciprocation either. It’s that begging for reshares or retweets isn’t the only desirable action on social media, and the focus on doing so is short-sighted.
To reap your algorithmic rewards, your content should stop the scroll, get liked, earn comments, and be reshared — a mix of actions. This applies to all social networks. LinkedIn’s algorithm wants to see (among other engagements), “meaningful comments” from people historically interested in your post topic or niche. Threads’ algorithm considers signals from user behavior which go beyond reshares and comments. If you stop watching a video partway through, it informs the algorithm you didn’t enjoy that piece of content. Instagram’s algorithm, of course, also likes to see likes, shares, and comments soon after the content is published.
So the next time you reach out to friends for that algorithmic boost, consider instead asking them to comment or drop a like your way. It’s an easier request to fulfill, especially for people who are pretty protective of what and how they promote things online.
That’s one of the most common, lesser known social media mistakes I see. I often see two more…
Not testing the same piece of content multiple times
You’re probably testing new ideas, new formats, new topics. But are you testing variants against any sort of control? It doesn’t need to be rigorous, but ideally, you’re running at least informal A/B tests for your content.
Did you publish something you thought was great but you’re surprised it wasn’t a hit? Try again with a new hook. You thought that 100-word post deserved more than 2 likes? See if you can make some edits, punch it up, and design it into an image carousel. Or perhaps, as a final Hail Mary, you can take that 60-word tweet, copy it into a text overlay on one of your original photos, add some background music to it, and publish it as an Instagram Reel.
Before you worry about whether you’re being repetitive, remember that only a small portion of your audience sees one of your posts. On Instagram, you’d be considered lucky if ~20% of your followers sees your post. Part of that is due to algorithmic magic, but it’s also due to user behavior. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has said that roughly three out of five users will open the Instagram app within a day, and they all have a lot of other content to see in addition to yours.
And that “lot of other content”? That only increases the likelihood that even if one of your followers did see your post, they won’t remember it when you recycle and repost a few weeks later.
The lesson: Don’t just recycle your content. Edit, refine, and repost. Keep testing new formats. And when you’re getting more out of the content you already have, you’re also just making that cost more sustainable for your business.
Writing for your peers, not your audience
Obviously, the exception to this is if your peers are your audience. But most of the time, your peers and audience are different.
Let’s say you’re a software company and you launch an online game that highlights lies you’re accusing your main competitor of saying. Then an employee from that competing company sends a snarky email to your customer support team. So you choose to screenshot and post this on LinkedIn, along with that person’s private contact information.*
Is that something your audience benefits from seeing? Or is that you trying to rally “the boys” on the sales floor?
Assuming you use your social media account largely for professional purposes and of course, if you’re posting from the company account, you’ll want to make sure you’re creating content specifically for your audience. And that audience is inclusive of consumers looking to make a buying decision, to journalists and analysts who are reporting about your business or industry.
So how do you know what type of content will resonate with your audience? There are at least a few ways:
Keyword research: Find (at least relatively) high volume keywords in your niche or industry, and create content about those topics. A tool like Moz, Ahrefs or Semrush can help you do this. If you’re looking for free tools, even Google Trends can point you in the direction of topics that are rising in popularity.
Social listening: Find your audience (or desired audience) online, pay attention to the conversations, and add to the conversation as you see fit. You can do this by finding the most relevant Subreddits and following along (great for interest-based communities!), making a saved search on LinkedIn of the most relevant creators in your niche (great for B2B), or using a social listening tool like Brandwatch to find trends and even do competitive analysis.
Audience research: Learn and observe what your audience is paying attention to and where they’re hanging out online. This is a bit like social listening, but has a bigger focus on the audience and what they’re doing off social media. This could come in the form of listening to the podcasts your audience listens to, doing customer interviews so you can ask your audience directly about their influences, or by using an audience research tool like SparkToro (wink wink). We’ll show you things like the other keywords your audience is searching for online, the top URLs they see in Google Search (so you can see your content competitors!), and even topics they’re interested in.
In fact, I’ve recently been using our Content Ideas feature to guide my LinkedIn content strategy. I’ve posted about aligning social media strategy with business goals and about using AI for content creation, and engagement hasn’t been terrible.
If you’ve seen some under-talked-about social media mistakes, I’d love to hear them. Feel free to leave a comment below, or @ me on social media: LinkedIn, Threads, and/or Bluesky.
*Yes, that’s a real recent example, but I don’t feel like giving any of these weirdos free press, so I won’t name them.