This week's Guest Post is written by Avinash Nair, a Digital Marketer at E2M, an agency in India where he is responsible for Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing services.
If you look at the social media fails of 2013, 2014 and 2015, you will see that most of the companies are riddled with the same problems as others. Even though, these problems can be easily handled, companies fail to deal with the situation. From US Airways infamous picture to Twitter’s unintentional tweet, we have seen a lot of mistakes in the past few years. In this article, we will discuss 3 common social media mistakes companies make.
Hitting The Send Button Too Soon
Every tweet or Facebook comment should be sent after counting until 10. The recent Tinder-Vanity fair meltdown proved that Tinder would have been much better off if it didn’t react to the Vanity Fair article. Tinder not only bashed Vanity Fair journalist once but 2-3 times on Twitter, leading people to take stand for either Tinder or against Tinder. This soon led to a public debacle and NYMag jumped in too adding fuel to fire.
Moral of the story is before you respond to any negative comment or trolls, count until 10, even 100 if you want to, and then decide what you want to do. Unless you are the guy working for Tesco, don’t attempt to answer to trolls.
Narcissist Much?
It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why some brands like Red Bull and Nike are doing so well on social media while some, despite spending millions, are not able to garner the same kind of reputation and attention.
This is because of 3 very common mistakes 1) they don’t have helpful content, 2) they don’t entertain or add any kind of value and 3) they are always talking about how great their brand is, how cool their products are, how amazing their discount is, what new features they added over the weekend and so on. Social media is about conversations and not conversions, so if you are all me, me, me, you might as well say goodbye to social media shares and reputability.
Mobilizing Social Media
If your social media strategy is all about sharing funny cat videos, tweeting one-liners and responding to customers, you are not using it to its full potential. One could even go as far as to say that it’s dead or on its last legs. We have too many business pages on Facebook that haven’t been updated from last 2 or 3 years because of lack of ideas and content. This is the biggest social media fail for any business because typically businesses should have a lot of things to share.
Social media is best used when you combine all other media platforms, conventional and unconventional, online and off-line, so as to get the best responses. For instance, do a small contest in a mall or public place, get a lot of people to participate and then post about it on social media. Alternatively, ask people to post their selfies with X people (friend, dog, brother, husband, daughter, sister, etc.) at your shop, café or place of business and win something. Contests like these will mobilize your social media and help you get more loyal patrons.
Takeaways
So here are a couple of things you must avoid – don’t respond to negative tweets in a hurry; think calmly. Whatever information people need about you, they will take it from your website, don’t brag on social media. Lastly, don’t let your social media platform sit idle, mobilize it with as many good contests as possible.
