Are you oversharing about your business offers on social media?

"If you don't brag about yourself, no one else will do". This is a great motivational quote to remind people not to be too modest of their achievements and encourage them to claim due to recognition for their own achievements and success. However, this doesn't give you a license to keep pushing too many social media messages about how awesome is your business and why your company is the only solution for every problem people will face in their life.

If you overshare content about your own business and products, this will be one of the biggest barriers to building trust among your connections and maybe the main reason why people unfollow you on social media. Oversharing of one's own business offers on social media may be the 2nd most annoying thing to do after sending unsolicited direct messages trying to sell your things.

Interestingly, it's not only on social media I see this mistake being done by Sri Lankan business leaders and experts. If you invite them for a conference speech, a panel discussion, a webinar, a training program, or any other opportunity for them to express their views and opinions, most of them take more than 60% of their time to tell the story of their own business.

Last year I attended the #AdWorld2020 online conference. Almost all the speakers of that event, 99% of the time talked about very broader topics covering the industry they are in, instead of only talking about their own company. But in Sri Lanka, if you invite someone for a conference speech or a webinar, they take that as an opportunity to go on and self promote their own companies interested in giving valuable content to the audience. People rarely understand the difference between a sales pitch and a conference topic, just as much as they don't understand the difference between a social media post and an advertisement.

If more than 50% of your social media posts are talking all about your company, the product, and the services you sell, then you are not using the full power of social media.

Not everyone who follows you on social media wants to buy from you right now. But they may want to buy from you some later day. By maintaining a reasonable mix of content on your social media profiles, you can be more relevant to your followers most of the time, even if they don't want to buy from you right now.

Here's what you can do right now.

Check your last 10 posts on LinkedIn.

Are all 10 boasting about your company or products you sell?

Or do you have some mix of content in other interesting topics, which adds value to people who follow you?

Think about this and start crafting a plan to maintain a better mix of what you are posting on your social media profiles.