For most small business owners, social media is a large part of their marketing strategy, thanks in no small part to the fact that it offers a free way to interact with customers and allows you to build a community around your brand. Many people choose to delegate this task to a marketing professional, while others take the task on themselves.
The latter is all well and good, but we’ve seen more than one business fall foul of common social media faux pas, which can ultimately affect their reputation. Here are five things to avoid if you run your own social media:
Defensiveness
Often, if someone has a complaint about a product or service, their first port of call will be the company’s social media pages, and how you deal with that can be the difference between a PR dream and a nightmare. Dealing with a complaint on a public page should be done with grace, because becoming defensive (even if you think the customer is wrong) will only reflect badly on you. Offer to direct message the person, rather than having an all-out slanging match on your Twitter feed to protect your image and settle the matter amicably and in PRIVATE!
Poor Spelling and Grammar
We’re aware that you don’t need to be William Shakespeare to run your own business, but there’s little more off-putting (or unprofessional-looking) than a business social media page which is littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. If you’re not confident that your posts are accurate, run them past someone with a good grip on spelling and grammar., or employ a social media manager to write them for you.
Bad Language
This should go without saying, but you’d be surprised how many people forget themselves and use bad language on a business page. Unless your brand is very adult-oriented, there’s a good chance that swearing will put a lot of people off and could really damage your sales potential. You don’t want to be remembered as the person who cusses at their customers!
Appearing Wishy-Washy
Having a proper social media strategy is more important than you might think – social media pages which don’t have a clear message or aren’t updated regularly can make your business look dead in the water and once people have clicked away from your page, it can be hard to get them back again. If you don’t want to post something every day, use a platform like Hootsuite to schedule a week or a month’s-worth of posts at a time, to avoid the equivalent of digital tumbleweed.
Ignoring Comments and Messages
You might not like it, but in 2018, social media has basically replaced every other type of communication with customers, which means that the first place they’ll go to make enquiries will likely be Facebook or Twitter. Ignoring customer comments and messages is one of the quickest ways to lose a sale, and a page full of unanswered questions will look pretty bad to any new visitors to your social media pages, too.
