How to Avoid Basic Social Media Fails

It’s safe to say we’ve stepped into an age whereby online business is hugely affected by our utilisation of social media. It might seem obvious now, with so many online businesses making the most of social media to get hold of and captivate their target market but social media is progressing all the time, so it’s vital that an effective company strategy is enforced that means you’re running your social media effectively.

There are so many benefits of having an effective social media campaign and plenty of catastrophic scenarios should you be running it badly. You could go from having an abundance of interested followers to a complete alienation of your target audience through a single, misinterpreted post or strategy change, so it’s vital that businesses understand the potential aftermath of running a poor social media campaign.

Social media has become the first port of call for any intrigued, satisfied or bemused customer that wants to get in touch with a company directly. Unlike phone calls and lengthy emails or even written letters, Facebook and Twitter are so much easier to use nowadays, with versions of both forms of social media available from computers, handhelds devices, mobile phones and more. This means that you need to be regularly active with regards to social media; otherwise customers may feel there’s no point in getting in touch directly.

Another reason businesses tend to fall short with social media is down to constantly referring to events that simply do not relate to their company or business campaign. You’re being followed by people for a reason and it’s usually related to your companies profile, so don’t relate to things they can’t understand. This is what results in alienation and ultimately a crowd of confused followers.

Constantly posting the exact same thing on each form of social media is also a bad idea, simply because they’re all different. For example, Twitter has a 140-character limit for tweets, whereas Instagram doesn’t, so if you accidentally copied over a longer-than-140-characters post from Instagram over to Twitter, you’d probably only be able to see a quarter of what you’ve written.

The easiest way to lose someone who’s decided to follow you is to not respond to any of their complaints. If you do manage to mess up down the line, you should always address the issue and use social media to make a public statement emphasising your apologies.

Following on from this, it’s incredibly important to freeze any automatic social media updates when a worldwide catastrophe or devastating event occurs, as people would much rather share their sorrows and condolences than here about your latest 30%-off advertisements.

Finally, if something in the back of your mind is telling you that what you’ve just written might not be a good idea, don’t go ahead with it. There are so many alternative ways of getting information across to people that there’s no harm in sitting back and thinking about how to a structure a post beforehand.  Careful planning and awareness of current worldwide events and activities can help you to structure a good post.