If you have started using social media marketing for your business, then congratulations! You have just tapped into one of the most effective marketing tools around. Not only will the top social media portals give you access to lots of prospective customers (think in the millions), but it also gives your loyal customers easy access to you.
Going on social media for your business may seem like an easy thing to do. How difficult can it be, right? Create your accounts, set up profile pictures and contact information, add images for your business, and you are ready to go, right? Not necessarily. Social media marketing is actually like a field filled with landmines that can hurt your company real bad if you are not careful where you step.
A lot of companies have made huge mistakes in social media marketing that hurts them to this day, and you do not want that to happen. To help you out, here are a few things you need to avoid doing with your company’s social media presence:
Lie to your visitors – this is the first thing you should always keep in mind. Never lie to the people who will be paying you for your products or your services. When trust is broken between you and your market, not only will they hate you for it and move to your competitor for their needs, they will tell others about what you did. This can destroy your company’s reputation (not to mention hurt your income stream), so as much as possible be upfront with your social media followers.
Deleting comments you do not agree with – you cannot please everybody. That is a fact of life. The same goes for social media. Not everyone who comes to your page is there to make nice with you. Some of these people are there to make trouble and will do so by posting comments that are inflammatory. Do not take the bait when this happens and do not delete these posts either. Instead, reply in a gracious and calm manner so that people can see that you are not afraid of people who throw negativities at you and are confident in your company’s reputation.
Engaging in a word war with a visitor – this is what may happen when a person that is irate posts on your page and you answer each and every accusation they throw at you. You are human after all and may run out of patience with people like this. The only way to stop these people from attacking you and riling you to engage in a posting battle is to stop. Once you have answered their initial accusation or defamatory post, step back and let them gripe all they want on the page.
Talk badly about the competition – while old-school advertising often pitted two rival brands against each other in commercials and ads that pointed out the flaws of the other (think the Cola Wars ads), these days, this practice is frowned upon. Even if you mention the other brand in a slightly bad light, it is seen as an attack on a competitor, which can backfire on you. People these days buy products and avail of services on the merits of the company offering these as well as the quality that these have. If you badmouth others, it may come across as you not being confident about what you have to offer, so much so that you have to resort to defamation to get people to ditch the competition to patronize you.
Post too much – it is called spamming, and yes, people hate it when this happens. How would you like to have your wall inundated by posts every hour or every other hour with stuff you are not interested in yet? Limit your posting to a few key ones per day or else you will find people who used to wait for your updates clicking the unfollow button. To do this, set a schedule for your posts and create a list of things that you will be posting according to this schedule. This way, you won’t post too many times in a day and you avoid becoming a spammy account.
Using your account like it was your personal one – this is another mistake some people make with their business social media account. They sometimes treat it like it was a personal one and post updates about family, friends, and the like on these pages. While it is touching that you want to get on a more personal level with your customers, not everyone appreciates this. Keep your business social media account professional and leave all the sappy, touching, personal stuff on your personal pages.
Not posting as frequently as is needed – while posting too much is frowned upon, posting too little is also a bad idea. Your social media pages will stagnate when you don’t post on a specific schedule and your customers will lose interest in your page. Try to follow your schedule, post interesting stuff that your customers will enjoy (just make sure it is related to your business and not some meme about a monkey or cat pictures that have no correlation to your site), and they will stay loyal to your brand and your pages.
