It is a mistake that many companies make when they start out with their social media accounts. They see the benefits of being able to connect and talk to a vast network of consumers who they may have previously been unable to reach. The temptation to start shouting about what they sell is great and often, it’s what they do. But it does not work.

When Facebook was created it was purely for University students, specifically Harvard in the very beginning before it began to spread across the world. Creator Mark Zuckerburg would not let advertising onto the site in the early days. In the movie The Social Network a great quote summed up the early ethos of Facebook, “We don’t even know what it is yet. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know what it can be. We don’t what it will be. We know that it is cool.”

YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim because they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Twitter too came about from an idea based on individual engagement, with co-founder Jack Dorsey introducing an idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group

The origins of social media and their consequent boom in growth tell us that these platforms were not designed to be drowned in adverts. They are designed around engagement, the individual experience and valuable content.

Making social media work means buying into that philosophy. Many of the users you want to engage with on these platforms are using personal accounts and don’t want to engage with content that is deliberately selling products and services. They will interact with and share content they find useful, engaging or entertaining and that is how your message will spread.