A social media presence has great potential for businesses looking to increase their reach, traffic and leads. But when it’s not used properly, it can actually damage your brand’s reputation.
Here are a few ways your social media presence can be killing your brand:
1. Inexperienced or Unsupervised Social Media Managers
Your social media managers are the face of your company online. With social media now driving almost a third of all referral traffic, it’s absolutely critical that those responsible for driving these referrals are up to the task.
While mistakes can’t always be avoided, we’ve seen too many examples of inexperienced, untrained or poorly supervised employees getting free reign of the company’s social media accounts.
Take the American Apparel debacle, for example. In celebration of the Fourth of July, the company posted a photo of the Challenger space shuttle exploding in midair. Apparently the social media manager was born after the 1986 disaster and mistook the explosion for clouds or fireworks. This could easily have been avoided had there even been one extra level of redundancy in place.
2. Not Responding To Negative Feedback
Negative feedback is going to happen. How you respond says a lot about your brand. Respond thoughtfully and promptly to negative comments, and use them as opportunities to showcase your commitment to customer service.
3. Buying Likes or Followers
Buying fans or followers is risky business. Some brands still believe that padding their numbers by paying for fictitious fans is a harmless endeavor. But did you know that buying Facebook fans can actually hurt your brand by decreasing your overall reach?
Fake fans will never interact or engage with your page, signaling to Facebook that your content isn’t interesting or valuable to your audience. This leads to an overall algorithmic decrease in your post reach and visibility. You could also find your account being closed, banned or deleted should Facebook find out about your schemes.
It’s far better to focus on attracting real, interested fans who will engage with your posts.
Ensuring a stellar social media presence simply means treating your social media followers the same way you’d treat in-store customers or clients will help you avoid mistakes.