five ways you can get social media WRONG!

These days pretty much every business has some kind of social media presence yet still some business don’t seem to gain any proactive benefit from these fabulous social media sites, is your business making those simple social media mistakes?

1. Boring updates  A boring update is anything that lacks your businesses unique personality or perspective, you need to give a new look and feel on and old topic or even going against the norm is what will get you noticed.

So ask yourself how you can infuse your own business ideals and the character this brings into each update – this is the key essence of branding, after all the last thing you want to be is forgettable.

2. Disrespecting others  Social media is not the place to publicly air your grievances with others, doing this on social media is simply no different than shouting insults at someone in public or raising your voice at a retail store employee. For sure it will get peoples’ attention, but that’s not the kind of attention you want.

3. Failing to promote others  Someone once said ‘givers gain’ and when it comes to building your business on social media and building a responsive network of followers you need to develop a reputation as someone who highlights others. Not only does this give credit where credit is due, it also communicates that you’re secure with your success and have the ability to promote others in your industry.

A couple of great ways to highlight others include:

• When someone gives you a great piece of advice, post it on Facebook or Twitter and tag that person.
• Why not use the endorsements feature on LinkedIn and begin endorsing people within your network.

4. Not replying to comments If your business has for example a Facebook page and people comment, by not replying to these comments this is no different than starting a conversation with someone and then ignoring their response. Actively monitoring comments and questions on every post can be time consuming, but even posting one follow-up comment per post can show you care and that you’re engaged.

5. Being tagged in questionable photos We were running a training session in Somerset in mid 2013 and one of the participants was easily found in a very questionable photo on Facebook – would you want that?  We know that lots of people will have had a photo taken that if you could wind the clock back you would want to change and indeed at the time may well have seemed rather funny, but you should think twice about allowing yourself to be tagged in any questionable photos whatever the site they are going onto.  The last thing you want is your business or staff in any image that bring the business into disrepute.

So here you have it our top five ways that your business can get Social Media wrong, and now the sales pitch if you need help or even just a no obligation chat then why not contact us through the website here – we’d love to show you how the team at Gleave Media can help your business proposer on Social Media.