Blog

Social Media Mistakes Anyone Can Make — And How to Avoid Them

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.