Popular Marketing Posts
Social Media For Businesses: The Dos and Don’ts
Social media can be a very useful tool to grow your business, but getting it right is a bit of a balancing act.
If you’re too formal and robotic then customers won’t feel they’re really engaging with you; if you’re too informal and familiar then you can look unprofessional.
To give you an idea of how to get the balance right, here are some useful social media dos and don’ts that every business should be aware of:
Do
Be Consistent: With social media, you need one voice across all channels so you are providing a consistent message. So if you have more than one person doing this task, make sure they are well-versed on how to present the company. Also, make sure you are posting regularly: this doesn’t mean tens of posts a day, but if you decide to post just once a day then you should stick to this. If you’re leaving your account for months at a time then you’d be better off not having one as it does look unprofessional.
Know Your Customers: Tailor your social media pages to suit the interests of your customer base rather than your own. Remember, they don’t care about you – they care about how your products or services can help them. Post stories and images they can relate to. Write blogs on how to solve specific problems they might have to link to these from your social media sites.
Stand Out: Take the time to be original and creative with your posts. Remember that the companies with the most successful social media strategies are those that are able to build a distinctive voice. Let your customers know what makes your company different from all your competitors.
Don’t
Over-Share: It’s a fine line between creating the kind of informal voice you want for social media and being over-familiar. Make sure you are careful of the things you share and steer clear of anything at all that could be deemed offensive. Also, don’t give away too much information if you are about to introduce a new product: provide hints to build anticipation ahead of the launch.
Advertise: Social media is a great place to promote your brand, but you should never use it simply as an advertising platform. When you want to advertise, do this through the traditional channels. When it comes to Facebook, Twitter etc, you should be using them to build a following and connect. Pushing for the hard sell will simply put people off.
Automate Too Much: Because social media is about connecting and starting a dialogue with your customers, over-automating kind of defeats the purpose. Yes, the automatic updating tools available can be useful sometimes if there are regular updates you need to give, but as far as possible you should be ‘humanising’ your brand. It may take longer but it will pay off in the end.