Your company’s social media presence is a precious thing. It can be a valuable customer service tool, generate leads and even increase sales. But often times, what we are doing on these sites is hurting our brand’s reputation. Here are seven surefire ways to completely destroy your company’s social media presence.
7. Sync All Your Social Media Accounts Together
It may be a tempting option to blast out one message to all your sites at once, but resist the urge. Each site has it’s own unique (unspoken) protocols and by blasting out one message everywhere, it’s going to show a lack of personalization and that you don’t care about your followers/fans/subscribers.
6. Make sure every tweet and Facebook page update includes these words, “easy ways to make money online.”
This should be a no brainer. If I ever see these six words, or some variation of it, I will block you and report you as spam. Period.
5. Send out auto-DMs asking everyone, who follows you, to also “like” you on Facebook, add you on Linkedin and subscribe to your blog.
Auto-DMs, how I hate thee. Auto-DMs are annoying and have no personal touch. Instead of sending out, “Thanks for the follow” updates to every single person, why not just retweet something the new follower has posted or leave a comment on their blog about why you loved their new blog post. That stands out a lot more than an annoying automated message.
4. Be Overly Defensive
Social media, at its root, is just talking. People will inevitably say things about your brand that you don’t like. There is no need to start an overly defensive rant and go after the person. Instead, stay calm and listen to what they have to say. Then, come up with an appropriate response.
3. Dive into every social media channel all at once with no strategy
This isn’t Texas Hold ‘Em. There is no reason to “go all in.” This is setting yourself up for failure. It’s crucial to develop a social media strategy with clear-cut goals before you actively start engaging on these channels.
2. Ignore all replies and comments
This is one of the dumbest things you can do. If someone takes the time to write about how much they love your product, then please take the time to write a thank you reply. The same goes for negative comments. If someone adamantly doesn’t like something, then try to understand why they don’t like it and/or what you could do to fix it. This shows that you are listening and being SOCIAL. This is after all “social” media.
1. Have Charlie Sheen be your community manager
This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates a critical point. Your community manager must be someone, who you can trust to channel the brand’s reputation across all online platforms.