What’s your biggest turn off on social media? Is it the people who are always negative, those who start drama, or those who are fake? All these and more definitely hold their own weight when it comes to inappropriate actions on social media.

Just as offline habits like chewing with your mouth opened and interrupting a conversation are repulsing, bad habits happen online too. And unfortunately, social media attracts a lot of it. Though we at SugarSpun encourage people to be human, etiquette and even street smarts needs to play a role.

This is especially important for businesses to understand.  Behind every business, there is usually one individual or a handful of people that act on behalf of their company’s social efforts. As a result, your business has personality. If you have multiple people implement your social strategy, you obviously have variety, but your brand will still portray its own persona.

Due to all this character, albeit how colorful it may or may not be, that is expressed on social media, stereotypes have already been created defining the various types of sharers. In fact, online media monitoring service Meltwater recently created a quiz to help users define what type of sharer they are on social media.  The quiz was based off research from the New York Times called the Psychology of Sharing. In this, the following sharers are defined:

-          Hipster – less likely than other sharers to use email for sharing content. These sharers are creative, young and popular

-          Careerist – these sharers are savvy business networkers and are more likely to share content on LinkedIn.

-          Altruist – these sharers are helpful, reliable, thoughtful, connected and only use email to share.

-          Selective – these sharers are resourceful, careful and thoughtful. They share informative content via social networks as well as by email.

-          Boomerangs – these sharers share information to get a reaction and to feel validated. They are empowered by social media and tend to use both Twitter and Facebook.

-          Connectors – these sharers are creative, relaxed, thoughtful and use social media as a tool to organize their social lives offline.

These social sharing descriptions are pretty accurate, right? In spite of which sharing category you or your business fit into, it’s important to understand that social media etiquette plays a role. It’s not that there is a perfect category for sharing, but there are some do’s and don’ts that everyone should adhere to.

Best Master’s in Education put together an excellent infographic containing helpful information that shows how you can avoid becoming stereotype by simply applying some social networking etiquette:

Source: BestMastersinEducation.com

Display image courtesy of Wikipedia.org.