Now that everyone and their grandmother has a Facebook page, there are more professionals who know how to judge your content and your messaging. Just as you can tell when your friends are bluffing in a poker game, your competition can tell when and where cracks will appear in your social media campaigns. And if they can find the cracks, they can take your customers. Fortunately, there are three different ways you can protect your social media image.

1. Always Anchor – No posts should go up without a general strategy in mind. After all, you wouldn’t run an ad campaign without a strategy, would you?

2. Build to Consistency – Everyone makes mistakes at the beginning of a marketing campaign. But professionals learn from their mistakes quickly, gauging response through tools such as Facebook insight to learn which posting styles are popular and which could use some work. Eventually, their pages feature nothing but posts with a reasonable chance of creating engagement.

3. Engagement – Facebook posts, twitter updates, and LinkedIn discussions don’t work like advertising billboards. They work effectively only when people comment, share, like, and retweet.  Again, a professional uses research and experimentation to create posts with the maximum amount of virality.

All of these rules sum up into one Golden Rule: Act professionally and put in the work, you’ll get professional quality results.