When you think about social media, everything seems to be pretty easy. With all the tools at your disposal, you just need to make a few occasional clicks, and your brand will miraculously flourish beyond your wildest dreams.
Unfortunately, social media are a treacherous sea that can reward you with smooth sailing or sink your brand to the bottom. This is why managing social media should be dealt with careful consideration. If you still don’t know what you should do, here is a list of things you definitely shouldn’t do.
1) Having no clue about your audience
Although some may think that they should be promoting their brand to everyone, there is hardly a more harmful conviction. Every business needs to have a plan, starting from audience segmentation all the way to finding influencers who can help them reach their target market.
Ideally, identifying who your customers are should be done before determining the channels you will employ in reaching out to them.
2) Ignoring negative feedback
The online community is sensitive, unforgiving, and at times, even merciless. Negative comments on social media are pretty much inevitable. Still, many brands shy away from negative feedback by simply ignoring it.
The truth is, negative comments can be just as beneficial for your business as positive ones. That is, if you know how to turn the tables in your favor. Timely responses, polite language, and transparency are of pivotal importance to negative-comment damage control. However, not all complaints are worth the effort. Negative feedback involving racist remarks, sexist content, or aggressive demeanor is better off ignored.
3) Avoiding interaction
Tiptoeing around your customers is likely to lead them into thinking that you don’t even exist. You should always pay close attention to social mention monitoring instead of giving your customers the cold shoulder. After all, people bond with brands on the grounds of the brand’s ability to show the human touch.
No matter how positive or negative the feedback may be, you have to be there in order to demonstrate a keen interest in their demands and opinions.
4) Posting too little or too much
This is perhaps the ideal moment to know when enough is enough. There is no one-size-fits-all formula to help you calculate just how much exactly you should post.
However, publishing relevant content guaranteed to spark interest with your audience is always a good thing (on the condition you don’t publish solely for the sake of keeping the account active). Another important point to keep in mind is the peak-time when your audience is likely to be online. There is no need to publish anything if no one is there to interact with the content.
5) Not paying attention to analytics
As scary as it may seem, analytics won’t bite you. On the contrary, the benefits you can reap from utilizing it will exceed your expectations.
Not only does analytics help you understand your audience but it also shows you the types of media that perform best. What’s more, through analyzing data, you can get a better view of your competitors. As a result, you can learn from their mistakes or follow their recipe for success.
6) Being inconsistent
This problem often emerges when businesses don’t pay attention to their customer service, with everyone involved replying to comments and handling social media accounts. This is bound to produce an inconsistent voice when communicating with the customers and consequently, provoke distrust in your brand.
Instead, brands should agree upon the formality, the vocabulary, and the overall tone of their voice in order to sound genuine and credible.
7) Being too pushy
No matter how tempting the urge may be, occasionally try and use social media for purposes other than selling. People are fed up with brands constantly trying to advertise their products. The harder you try, the more they will clutch their wallets.
Instead, offer them something for free. It can be a coupon, a free tutorial, or even a free trial period. It will add value to your brand and evoke a positive emotional and social response.
Final thoughts
Obviously, social media has gained quite a momentum and the trend is showing no signs of stopping. For this reason, making mistakes can not only tarnish your brand’s reputation, but it can also crush it beyond repair.
Luckily, the majority of them can be easily mended if you set your mind to it and accept the fact that there are certain things you might have overlooked. In either case, never underestimate the power of social media and aim at using them in your best interest.