Social Media Business Blunders

Avoid these gaffs in order to succeed

These days, whether you are starting up a new brand, or marketing an existing product, sooner or later you will need to engage with social media. It is that crucial to modern day business, as it opens up multiple doors for businesses, who wish to promote their company to a wider audience.

Source: socialmapmedia.com

When the time comes, and you participate in social media activity, you need to ensure that you have a thoroughly thought-out strategic plan, a strong content strategy, and you will have needed to research heavily. The latter is where many companies slip up, and a lack of attention to what has failed for other firms in the past, can lead to you making the same mistakes.

Below are five mistakes that get made far too often by businesses looking to break into the social media game. If you avoid them, then you are on course to allow your business to thrive online.

Mixing up accounts

Most native platforms and third-party apps make it easy to toggle back and forth between business and personal accounts, which is great, but it can also be a recipe for disaster. Using this technique to maintain your social media can lead to accidental tweets or posts coming from one of your accounts, and this can lead to a shot reputation. A sound solution to this issue is to use separate and distinct apps for each account, and this ensures that there is zero chance of mixing up what account you are posting from.

The platform that never sleeps

In the world of digital communication, there is no time to rest. Consumers can interact with companies at any time, and this requires firms to man their social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is minimum requirement that someone at least monitors the chatter around the businesses’ social media as they will be able to identify anything that is amiss. High profile businesses have suffered due to the neglect of their social media accounts in the past, and British Airways once told customers that their Twitter feed was “open” only during certain times of the day. This, despite Twitter being a service that never stops running, and British Airways flying around the world at all times of the day and night.

Source: salary.com

Automated messages

There are so many apps and tools that allow you to link your accounts to an automated system that will save you a lot of bother. These systems will schedule posts, change profile pictures, and reply to messages with canned responses. If you go down this route, and base your social media around automated responses, you will have created a social media robot. This is a cost effective technique, but it lacks the human touch required to make customers truly satisfied with their experience. Automated communication comes off cold, especially in a time where a customer needs reassuring that a problem is being dealt with. In this case, genuine interaction can be the difference between keeping and losing a loyal customer.

Jumping the gun

Many marketers are on the lookout for opportunities to get ahead of the game, and the two frequent strategies used are tapping into trending topics and hashtag story sharing. Both have the potential to be incredibly successful, but if they go wrong. Ouch. So many companies have used a hashtag without researching the topic, and this can look unprofessional.

Malice posts

The majority of people now own a smartphone, and most workforces are all equipped with them, and this allows anyone in the team to instantly post videos, photos and other content. A great deal of illustrious companies have suffered from employees compromising internal corporate workings, but they still haven’t learnt it seems. A social media policy will not stop everyone from pushing the boundaries, but it will help reduce any silly errors that are made by existing employees.

Alex Smith

Alex is an English Literature and Sociology undergraduate whose love for written word has led him to write about some obscure topics in his time. Currently a content writer at Social Media Frontiers, be sure to follow him @AlexSatSMF.

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