3 Reasons People Spam - Do You Make These Mistakes?

spam may taste great out of a can, but it leaves a sour taste online

Photo Credit: freezelight

Spam comes in many forms online. Unless you know what can constitute spam you may be unaware your are even doing it. The root of all spam can be reduced down to a few key points. 

1. Not knowing your target audience

Everything on the internet has a time and a place. The aforementioned 'place' is defined when you start using the medium. Let's say you decide to join twitter and you spend a few months posting interesting stuff about your life and your music. If you were to start talking about a completely different topic and abandon your original purpose. Many of your followers would be inclined to unfollow you. Especially if you changed your tone from a conversational tone, to an advertising tone. As you are no longer giving them what they expected or wanted to receive.

If you choose to have a feed for your latest news and gigs, don't start posting pictures of your cat.

Your fans will choose what part of your online presence they wish to follow, be it your blog, facebook or twitter. How they initially perceive it, will setup expectations for what they are going to receive from that avenue of communication. If you then decide to take a completely different route, you will destroy their expectations. If you repeated do this, they may decided you are no longer what they signed up for and decide to unsubscribe, unfan and unfollow you.

2. Not understanding frequency

This is such a simple thing, yet so many bands are simply unaware. For any given media there is a finite number of times you can use it in a given period of time. The actual number is dependent on many factors, as such it's best to judge with your gut. If you feel like you are spamming, chances are you are.

Be careful as to how many posts, gig invites, tweets, comments, etc you send out or leave around the place. There is a balance between informative and spam.

For example there is an unwritten rule around the web that more than 20 tweets a day can be excessive. For a band a couple blog posts a week would typically suffice. As I said before there is limit, you need to find the right balance.

3. Laziness

Overall spam comes from an exceptional amount of laziness. The laziness to go about and learn the etiquette of the media you wish to communicate with. Don't assume every platform is the same. You can get away with stuff on myspace that would have you ignored on facebook. The only exception is a blog, which is like your home on the web. You make the rules.

The laziness to go about and understand your fans, what they expect and what they want. Laziness to understand new communications models, and new advertising models. The laziness and ignorance to assume that old style one-to-many tactics apply on one-to-one and many-to-many communications platforms.

Online communication should best be treated like a conversation. You wouldn't give a rampant sales pitch to a friend, or fan you just met. Online is no different.