Guest Post: My Favorite Social Media Pet Peeves

• Stop it with these: { } You don’t just put random words into brackets for fun. What you are doing makes absolutely no grammatical sense. You think it is cute; it looks ridiculous and twee.
• Cease referring to yourself as a Maven. Or a Guru. Or an Expert. Unless you actually have some street cred and can back it up. Words have meaning. Having a Twitter account does not make you a social media maven, a marketing guru or any type of expert. Reading Blogging for Dummies does not make you a consultant. It’s okay to not always have a title.
• Do not make things fly across my screen. I counter-attack by making my arrow fly across the screen to close your blog. I win.
• Stop stealing stuff from other people. Watermarks mean that it belongs to someone else. Same thing with the word proof. If it doesn’t have a creative commons license, don’t copy it. Don’t publish it. Get your finger off of the right click or whatever it is that Apple people do. Just because something is on the internet doesn’t mean it is in the public domain. Let me repeat: copyright applies on the internet. Buy your photos. Make your own photos. Stop stealing your content. If you are properly using something under fair use, bravo. But if you don’t know what fair use is, stop trying to make a losing argument.
• Don’t cheat and don’t lie. The internet knows and it is watching. Someone will figure out and you are going to get busted. Usually, when that happens, shit gets awkward. It’s a lot easier for all involved if you don’t do it in the first place.
• You do not need to break Facebook’s Terms of Service to be popular. Don’t do it because everyone else does. Bloggers would be better served if everyone stopped.
• Learn how to use an apostrophe. Mom’s are awesome. That’s not right. If you are staring at a word and thinking, I do not know if this gets an apostrophe or not, please think, do I mean that there is more than one of this thing. If that’s what you mean, you do not want an apostrophe. Apostrophes are not how you make words plural. It’s how you make contractions and possessives.
• Please stop misspelling judgment. (This one is a stretch, I know.)
• Do not publish blurry photos. You don’t need photographic content so badly that you should post bad pictures.  Also, do not post 19 photos of the same thing. If you are going to do that, I recommend a video. A series of moving pictures. They have great impact.
• Disclose. If you are working with a brand, disclose it. Be transparent. There is no need to hide it.
• If you are criticized, accept it with grace and humility. Your blog is your domain, but if your audience gives you respectful feedback, listen. Do not call people “jealous haters” simply because they disagree with something you’ve done. (First of all, they aren’t jealous. They’re envious.) Dissent is not always a sign of envy. Sometimes people are simply not into what you are doing and they will tell you about it.
• Be true to yourself. Why are you posting things about products that you would never use simply because a brand sent them to you for free? It is exciting when you get attention from brands, but you should only accept campaigns that are true to your personal brand.
• Verbiage doesn’t mean what you think it does. And verbage? Oh boy.
• Your content is why people are visiting your blog in the first place. Content comes first. Treat it with respect.
• Stop stabbing me in the eyes when I look at your blog. When you make poor design choices, I will not visit your blog again. It might seem like a good idea at the time, but just like reviving acid washed jeans, it’s not. You don’t have to pay a dime to have an attractive blog. Check out this site for practical tips on how to make your site more user-friendly and less cringe-worthy.

Danielle Liss is the Chief Marketing Officer of FitFluential. She used to practice law.