Today’s business climate holds incredible power for social media marketing. It has become the center of information for both professional and personal use. The majority of people know how social media works; however, only a minority knows about the mistakes that can be made. Read on and get one-step closer to handling your social media efforts much better.
Failing to Post and Respond
You need to ensure you are posting regularly and the content you post should meet both the needs and interests of your clients. You need to ensure you respond to your clients, and not put them on hold. We all hate being on hold, which is why you should avoid doing this.
Not Being Creative and Not Watching Your Competitors
What you want to do is grab the attention of your clients, which means you need to give them shock, humor, and motivation in your content. They should not refuse your offer and you should try surprising them occasionally. If you visit the sites of your competitors, you can take down notes of the things that are working for them, and implement them into your own.
Not Focusing on Quality Feedback or Being Original
It is likely you may get negative comments. People can speak freely and some may say good things, whilst others not so good. You should focus more on the quality feedback and create any new opportunities from any negative comments. One thing you do not want to do is annoy your customers, so be sure not to do too much, as that can harm your business.
Not Trying Something New or Understanding Your Platform
It is important you are not limiting yourself to one area. You need to come out of your comfort zone and try new things. You also need to see the social network that best fits your business. Use the one that your audience is most active on and save yourself time by avoiding the rest.
Ignoring Data and Paying for Fan Base
You need to track down each new activity that happens on your site. Doing this allows you to see what strategies are both working and not working. You need to avoid unnatural practices and should not buy followers. Follow the above tips and there is no reason to why you would have to buy even a single fan.
The need of reputation management in the online sphere has rapidly grown as it becomes the primary source of information for many people around the world and in your local area. Reputation can be tarnished easily and often unfairly and this can lead to damage to your brand and financially negative consequences completely out of proportion to the event.
The Problem
When damaging information is presented on the internet it can quickly snowball and impact your business. The best reputation management companies can put in place strategies and techniques that can respond to these events. This can be done by in a number of ways and will minimize or negate the impact of the damaging information that has been released.
How to Fix It
The most important part of providing the service is proactively tracking what is said about the target business on the internet. It is vital to be timely in responding to minimize damage and prevent it becoming a major issue. The two main areas that the best reputation management companies target are forcing the targeted comment, article or feedback to be ranked lower and less visible by placing positive information that is optimized to appear in search engines ahead of the items in question.
The second important area is giving the customer feedback about these negative events so that they can be acted upon through changes in business practice. This can positively impact the business and allow them to quickly become aware of problem areas and take action to rectify, explain or warn customers.
Ethics
The best reputation management companies do not resort to unethical behavior to help their clients. This is not only because it is wrong but also because it can lead to a larger problem. While some people may even view generating positive reviews and targeting keywords so negative information is harder to find it is a general and well understood practice that is entirely visible.
There are companies that will use ‘black hat’ solutions because they can be cheaper to implement allowing for higher profits in the short term. In the end the client can find their websites black listed and informal online groups targeting them because of these practices making the problem much worse.
While search engines are still the clear leaders in the amount of people to use them each day social media websites are attracting huge numbers daily and are clearly in second place and continuing to grow. This is a huge audience so marketing to them can be a great idea but it is important to choose the best social media marketing companies so that you have the best chance of success.
Money Doesn’t Work
Social media has been difficult for traditional marketing companies to use effectively because of it changeable nature and interactivity. Throwing more money at a campaign has proven to be totally ineffective while innovative and responsive campaigns that have used high medium and low budgets have proven to be much more effective.
Ads, Post and Videos
There are many different platforms and different ways to approach them. Facebook is embracing advertising and this can be an effective way that works with certain types of products. Creating a presence and offering people incentives for products can also be effective. This takes more work because you are on an interactive medium and people want to post questions and see how you answer. When done properly this can quickly snowball turning your social media space into a cool place to hang out.
Videos are a new area of social media marketing that the best social media marketing companies are heavily pushing. It is because videos make compelling content that can be shared on your website, YouTube and other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. That is a lot of quality links and power SEO juice that is being generated from a single low cost video.
The Potential Is Huge
The sheer size of the audience and the speed that the mobile device market is growing and has pushed social media to be the powerhouse it is today. There are hundreds of millions of social media capable mobile devices being added every month and in many developed countries penetrations rates exceed the population meaning there is more than one active device per person. This means that people are staying connected all the time, everywhere they go and social media is their number one choice for communicating.
Are you taking advantage of this potential?
Ever wonder why even the most popular brands have a Facebook page AND a Twitter account AND have a Pinterest presence? Well, it’s because now, social media has become one of the best and cost effective ways to reach customers and keep in constant touch with them. Individual use of social networking websites has increased so exponentially that businesses can now capitalize on its popularity. Here are some tips for your social media marketing strategy:
- Pick your Network: Know the various social media outlets out there. You don’t necessarily have to have an account with every social media website. Choose which ones you want to have a presence on, keep them focused on your target audience and keep them constantly updated.
- Active Networking: Business networking really starts with your own personal network. You never know who needs the service that you offer. Reach out to friends, classmates and former colleagues to spread the word.
- Professional Networking: Along with new customers, every business is also looking to improve themselves. Don’t underestimate the connections you have with others who offer the same services you do. Have a LinkedIn account and do some professional networking- you need a competitive edge and its necessary to know what others are doing to make their business better. Professional collaboration can sometimes help your business immensely.
- Engage your Audience: Keep your audience constantly updated on what you are doing to produce new customers for your business.
- Look for Ideas: Public engagement doesn’t just end with you making posts. It also involves reading what your audience has to say. You never know where the next big idea for your next big product may come from. Responses from your customers also allow you to measure what’s working and what is not within your business.
- Watch your content: Be professional and yourself when posting to your business profile.
Social media involvement can make or break your business. With the right content and engagement, social media can really be an advantage for your business. It is the most direct way to be in touch with your consumers and finding new avenues for your business.
Every business has a reputation to protect- not only in the real world but in cyberspace as well. These days, individuals are taking it upon themselves to rate brands and build their reputation online. Reputation management services allow you, as a business, to monitor how your business is being portrayed online and what you can do to improve your online reputation.
Reputation management is really a public relations term that refers to managing a business’ image. But with the growing importance of internet based businesses these days, reputation management has become a critical part of a business’ online marketing plan as well. It refers not only to building a positive image for your business in cyberspace, but also refers to managing negative feedback about your business by dealing with customer complaints and making sure the information about your business is positive. A company’s reputation relies on building a business image for potential clients- like determining your target audience and show how you fit into their lives.
Very often a business’ reputation depends on their customer ratings on various review sites (like Tripadvisor or Angie’s List), social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter), e-commerce sites (like Ebay and Amazon) and being considered top search engine results. It becomes important to constantly monitor these sites for reviews- especially negative ones that can damage a business’ reputation. Reputation management allows businesses to address negative feedback from customers and try to address customer complaints to improve your business’ reputation. Online reputation management services allow you to sit back and trust those who know how to manage online images. They analyse your current projected image online and suggest/enforce strategies to repair or improve your online reputation. It allows you to gain an edge over your competitors and increase the number of customers who are willing to consider using your business.
A business’ profits depend on its reputation and in keeping with present times, an online reputation is just as important as your real world reputation. Reputation management services allow you to build a positive reputation online, repair it and build on it to increase your business and your profits.
One of the reasons you run your business online is to gain an increase to your customer base and a potential raise in sales and profits. It is important that you understand reputation management. If you are not aware of how to build and maintain your online reputation it might be best to hire someone who knows what to do.
Hiring from the best reputation management companies may cost you some of your hard earned cash at the beginning but you will get this back. To drive relevant traffic and create a solid customer base it is important that your impact on the internet is as big as it can be. However, it doesn’t matter how large it is, without the correct reputation, it will be meaningless. Here are some of the reasons why you need to look into reputation management right from the start:
Competition
Not everybody in business plays fair. You may come across competition that doesn’t play by the rules and will do everything they can to discredit you and your business. The best reputation management companies will help you to deal with the fallout from such negative campaigns and salvage any potential loss of business and the good name you have built up.
Sales
A good reputation is key to gaining sales. Most of us will only buy from a name or a business that we know of and trust. The same is true of the internet. If your reputation is bad or non-existent it will be hard for you to gain that trust and make you sales.
Save Money
Reputation management can help you to save money. The cost of hiring a professional doesn’t have to be prohibitive and they know how to build your online presence and reputation for the best possible outcome for your business.
Finding a professional but affordable reputation management company is important. You can do your research on the internet, making sure to read reviews and make sure to carry out thorough research. You can do this with little expenditure and reap the rewards of hiring the best reputation management companies to help you.
Lots of companies call reputation management groups because they had a disaster — an employee said something racist on the company Facebook account or your #ourcompanystories hashtag turned into a place for customers to tell horror stories about how one of their cousins found a bird’s foot in your boxed soup. But that’s kind of like looking for insurance just after you were diagnosed with cancer — a foolish use of a powerful tool.
The best time to seek out and hire the best reputation management company you can afford is when things are going well, not when they’re going south. What does a reputation management company do when you don’t have a disaster on your hands? Why, they prevent disasters, of course.
Sure, no one can keep your employees from stupidly misusing the Facebook account — but things like the #ourcompanystories debacle can be easily prevented by an alert reputation manager. Companies that look out for your reputation are experts at spotting not just active PR disasters, but potential PR disasters — the kind no amount of social media expertise can correct once they go public.
Reputation management companies come in a few different types. The lowest level types are the ones that specialize in knocking bad stories off of the news and making sure the SERPs don’t link to many pages disrespecting you or your company. These folks are nothing more than experts in ‘negative SEO’ — the art of tanking someone else’s rankings with black hat strategies. That’s not what you need; it’s reactive and it’s actively unethical.
What you want is a reputation company that will lead your company into the upcoming quarters and years by building a plan to cement your position in the marketplace and your public image. A company that will help you figure out who you appeal to and who you don’t, and work to improve your appeal to the second group. A company, in short, that will manage your reputation — not manage your reputation crises. Those are the best reputation management companies, and your company deserves one.
Social media is one of those areas of endeavor that can be rollickingly fun and successful for some people and then utterly tear the heart out of others. When it’s going well and you have the crowd eating out of the palm of your hand, it not only feels great, but you often end up with amazing side effects, like people going out and creating spontaneous backlinks for you.
But it only takes one bad moment to turn that dream into a nightmare of criticism, anger, and — worse of all — silence. The amazing thing is, it doesn’t even have to be something that you did wrong. Look at McDonalds, for example, and the ill-fated hashtag #mcdstories on Twitter. McD’s promoted the use of the hashtag as a place for people to tell warm, fuzzy stories about Happy Meals and whatnot — but it quickly became used by anyone with a horror story to tell about McDonald’s, and the entire campaign turned into a massive effort by McDonald’s to sweep it all under the rug.
So how do you avoid making horrible mistakes with social media? Well, the most obvious tip is to not do your own social media-ing. Hire one of the best social media marketing companies you can afford, and let them take care of your social business for you. And if you’re not completely secure with that, get a reputation management firm to back the social media company up in a pinch.
If you can’t afford that kind of consulting, there are still a few simple tips you can follow to make sure social media mistakes don’t happen.
- Have a Single Point of Contact — don’t let just anyone from your business get on your company’s social media accounts. Have one person handle your social media, and impress him or her with the importance of staying even-headed and not taking anything too seriously.
- Excrement Occurs — there’s no such thing as 100% positive on the social media — you’re doing quite well if you reach 75% positive. Accepting the negative without panicking or responding with trumped-up justifications is the way to go.
- Remember the 90/10 rule — 90% of what you share on the social media should be for your consumer’s benefit (and not in the “here’s a coupon so you’ll come buy things!” kind of way, but in the “here’s useful information or a clever thing to do that relates to our industry/product/service” kind of way.) The other 10% should be oriented toward your business interests.