7 Social Media Mistakes That Could Ruin Your Reputation

Today, there’s no denying the power of social media. In the day and age we live in today, Regardless of the business you’re involved in, whether it’s ecommerce or app development, social media is crucial for your marketing strategy.

According to a study conducted by LinkedIn, 94 percent of small and medium businesses today use social media for marketing. Not just that, but over 3 billion people use social media each month, increasing the target audience for your business.

With the advent of technology, business growth is as high as ever. However, at the same time, competition is, also, at an all-time high with businesses competing at a global level. There is little room for error and a small mistake on social media can lead to the downfall of an established business, destroying years of hard work, money, and time.

Keeping this in mind, here are seven mistakes you should avoid on social media:

 

Neglecting Your Customers

When you start a business, your primary aim is to ensure your customers’ satisfaction. Today’s customers have infinite options available, which makes it even more difficult for businesses to win them over. Keeping this in mind, it’s important to remember that customers have queries they would like to have solved as soon as possible, and one of the ways they can reach out to you is through your social media platforms.

Today, 80 percent of customers use social media to reach out to businesses. Therefore, social customer service is as vital as ever. Companies that don’t respond to questions and comments may find themselves in hot water. The lack of a response gives customers the impression they’re not essential and prompt them to switch to a rival brand.

Social media is an excellent platform to prove yourself as the business that genuinely cares about its audience. Nike, for example, doesn’t just have great marketing, but it offers exceptional customer service, too. It responds to customers in a timely manner whenever they have queries, showing them they matter in the process.

 

Posting Insensitive Content

Just because every other business is becoming popular with funny or witty content, doesn’t mean you need to, too. What works for another brand, may not necessarily work for you. Instead of trying to make people laugh, your social media personality should be welcoming and friendly, and you should share content that’s in line with your brand personality.

If you’re adamant on cracking jokes, though, you need to be careful about ensuring they’re not offensive at all. Cinnabon, for example, paid tribute to Carrie Fisher, a beloved icon, with the post below.

Do you see what’s wrong with this post? You can’t remember an icon and promote your products at the same time. It gives the impression that a brand is taking advantage of someone’s death and that’s incredibly insensitive.

 

Not Using The Right Metrics

Even though social media seems easy to master, it is an investment that needs to be measured nonetheless. There are many metrics you can use to measure your performance on various platforms, helping you determine whether your marketing efforts are yielding results.

Social analytics can help you track the success of your social media efforts and, once you list down a few key performance indicators (KPI), can tell how much impact they’ve had on your business.

However, these KPIs only matter you use the correct ones. For instance, many businesses consider thousands of likes on their pages as an indicator of their success. Those likes, however, don’t mean anything if they aren’t backed by a strong engagement rate that shows that as many people are talking about your business.  

 

Handing Off Social Media To An Intern

With mistakes are being made left, right, and center, you’d think businesses, by now, would realize the importance of being careful on social media. However, businesses continue to hand over their social media accounts to inexperienced interns who continue to make blunders.

Running a personal profile on social media is entirely different from running a business profile; a fact that many tend to forget.

In 2014, Amnesty International posted a tweet in response to the chaos at Ferguson. Someone at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies thought it would be a good idea to tweet the following response:

The tweet was deleted after a while and the Senior Vice President for external relations at the company, Andrew Schwartz, told Talking Points Memo,  “It was sent by a CSIS intern who had access to our account for monitoring purposes. Apparently, he meant to send something reflecting his personal views from his personal Twitter account.”

It’s crucial to realize that nobody, but a professional, should manage your social media profiles. You need someone who knows the audience and is an expert at engaging them. Your chosen person should, also, understand and be able to analyze it. You should consider hiring someone who specializes in manager social media pages and has a good grasp on them.

 

Being Too Pushy With Sales

Even though social media is supposed to promote your business and increase awareness for your brand, don’t mistake it for an advertising medium. Regardless of your product offering, too many posts about your products and services will annoy followers and force them to look the other way.

People follow you to stay updated; you need to provide compelling and engaging content to ensure they come back happily. Social media is about building relationships, and failure to do so will push your followers away. Repetitive content is a horrible practice and one that should strictly be avoided.

The below series of posts by Trustyshoppe are not only pushy, but show lack of originality as well due to the repetitive nature of the content.

 

Not Paying Attention To Grammar

This simple tip applies to various areas of your life, including your social media profiles. Your posts always need to be double-checked for any grammatical and spelling errors before the world sees them.

Content filled with mistakes show unprofessionalism and gives the impression that you didn’t even care enough to proofread your content.

 

Being Too Formal

Perhaps the reason why social media is so popular with customers, potential and existing alike, is because it gives them a chance to have a friendly, casual conversation with a brand. Many businesses fail to take advantage of this aspect of social media and, instead, act completely formal while interacting with customers.

A formal and uptight tone defeats the entire purpose of social media interaction, making you sound like a robot rather than a human being. You can make a user-generated content that allows your customers to feel comfortable and want to interact with you. Talk to them like you would talk to a friend and make your business easier to relate to.

That doesn’t mean you stop being professional; at the end of the day, your business is still being presented in a public setting. It just means you should stop addressing your customers with “Dear Sir/Madam” and use their first names instead.

 

There you go, a list of seven social media mistakes that could have a negative impact on your brand’s reputation. While managing social media is definitely easier than making a website and running it, it can definitely go wrong if not used properly. To ensure you’re avoiding these obvious mistakes, like everything else, you should have a system in place. Remember, social media is an excellent asset to add to your business, but its advantages can only be realized if you use it properly.

Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make with regards to social media is the failure to switch things up. The best part about social media is the fact that it’s dynamic and that there are very few things that wouldn’t work.

Keeping this in mind, it’s important to show off your brand’s fun side since that’s exactly why social media trends were made!

 

Dave Schneider is the marketing manager at Albacross, the free B2B lead generation platform. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries.