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Is Your Company Making These Social Media Mistakes?

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Many companies have realized the importance of being on social media. They made the Twitter account and the Facebook page, they’ve generated some content for the pages and they’ve even gained a few fans and followers. They know what they need to do, and they’re actively working on their goals.

These companies are using social media the right way, but unfortunately, that cannot be said for all companies on social media. Though there are those who are doing it right, too many are making harmful social media mistakes — mistakes that can not only be costly, but can completely damage the brand. If you want to use social media the right way, you need to make sure that you’re not making any of these major mistakes.

Mistake #1: Not paying attention to what’s going on.

When you have a social media account, you have to pay attention to what is being said about your company on these sites. If you don’t, someone can use these channels to say or post something nasty about your brand, leaving you unaware of a social media mishap.

Monitoring your brand can be done on your own through the use of tools like Google Alerts. All you have to do is set up an account and enter a few keywords, and Google Alerts will notify you anytime one of your keywords is mentioned online. Keywords can include your company’s name, the names of your employees or anything else that relates to your business or your industry. You can have the email alerts sent once a day, once a week or in real time.

You can also enlist the help of an outside monitoring agency, such as Radian6. When you outsource your monitoring, these companies are responsible for keeping an eye out for what is being said about your brand and notifying you if an issue arises.

When you monitor what’s being said, you can quickly alleviate any issues that arise before they turn into a complete social media disaster. Plus, it also lets you know what your customers are saying about you, and lets you know if they’re happy or upset with your products and services.

Mistake #2: Not responding to comments.

Whether it’s a negative or a positive comment, you need to respond. If a customer is complaining about your product or service online, you need to help alleviate the issue online. Don’t call them or send them an email. Other people who see the negative comment online don’t know that you called or emailed. All they see is the customer’s complaint and that you did nothing, which could open the floodgates for more negative comments. When you alleviate the issue online for all to see, everyone who comes across the post will know how you handled it, making the situation less interesting to the outside world.

This is the same for positive comments too. If a customer praises you online, thank them. These people are now advocating your brand for you by publicly stating how much they enjoy your product or service. If you don’t respond, they may start advocating for a brand who will appreciate it.

Mistake #3: Not showing personality.

Social media is a great way for your brand to show your personality. Stop using canned responses and get creative with your posts and comments. When you have a personality, it intrigues more of your customers and gets them actively involved in your social media efforts. People will be more interested to see what you have to say or how you will respond to their comments. Whether you want to be funny or intelligent is up to you, just make sure to show who you are.

Mistake #4: Not being active.

Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page isn’t going to do anything for your business. You have to work at it. Comment on your fans’ posts. Create your own interesting posts. Share images or videos. Create a poll or a contest. The more active you are on these sites, the more people will notice and start engaging with your company. If you simply create the pages and do nothing, nothing is exactly what will happen.

Social media can be used to your company’s advantage, but you have to actively work at it and use it the right way. If you are guilty of making these social media mistakes, you’re not going to see much action or much success.

This valuable online marketing article was prepared by Jacob Smith in tandem with SEOMap a group specializing in seo keyword research.

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5 Steps to Building Your Presence in Social Media

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With the last two major updates to the Google algorithm, Panda and Penguin, there has been a decided shift toward social media cues in determining how highly websites should be ranked. It is safe to say that as social media becomes a larger part of our lives, and Google finds additional ways to weigh this information, your social media presence will have an even bigger impact on your ranking within Google. In this article, we will look at five steps toward building your social media presence the right way.

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1. Remain Focused

If you are new to social media, it probably seems a little overwhelming. Should you be Pinning articles and images? Should you be Tweeting? What about Facebook? And for that matter, what on earth should you say if you have never made a social media post before?

I know small businesses which struggle to keep up with posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. I’m a big believer in staying focused, concentrating on a few social media avenues, and making the most out of those opportunities.

You know the old proverb, “If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.” This certainly holds in social media, though I see no reason why you can’t have a strong presence on two or three platforms. The key is to allocate your time properly and have a cohesive strategy for your social media sites. Once you feel yourself being stretched thin, your efforts will suffer at all social media sites.

Twitter and Facebook are the two most important social media sites today, but the only thing that should matter to you and your business is which platform helps you build a following. If that is LinkedIn or Pinterest, you should be concentrating on those efforts. If Google+ is a better match for your target audience, concentrate your efforts there. Don’t think you need to be everywhere at once. Choose to show up at a few parties, and be the life of the party at each.

2. Build Your Audience Naturally

“For Five Dollars I Will Get You 5000 Followers on Twitter”

By now you have probably seen the hype ads promising you a huge following in social media for a one time payment. If it sounds too good to be true, you can be assured that it is.

You can get a rather large number of followers on any social media platform by paying for these “services.” The problem is, those followers will mostly be composed of automated accounts. At best you will be attaining followers who joined you because someone paid them a few bucks, and not because they have the least bit of interest in what you have to say. As we will see in the next point, this can be crippling to your social media rank.

Some people like to post infographics. Others post links to relevant blog posts. Some use humor. Others spark conversation by hitting controversial or hot button topics. But all successful social media presences are “engaging.” You know that person who is always surrounded by a crowd at the party because she is so darn interesting? You need to be that person in social media. You know that guy who is always handing out business cards to disinterested guests? Don’t be that guy.

3. Emphasize Quality Over Quantity

Quality over quantity is a common theme in Google’s algorithm, if you read between the lines of their public statements. Google has acknowledged that they pay attention to the engagement of your social media contacts. In other words, if you are posting links to meaningful articles or spreading great ideas, you will get a lot of engaged users sharing your posts. If you are totally self-serving and posting a lot of garbage, nobody is going to share your content.

Google picks up on this and uses it to measure how “important” you are viewed to be on your social platform. This goes back to the previous point about never buying your followers. Even if you have great things to say, if your followers are automated accounts or disinterested real people, they won’t be sharing your information. In this sense, someone with 500 connections and a lot of engagement is going to be viewed a lot more favorably than someone with 5000 connections and almost no engagement.

4. Personalize Your Presence

Taking the time to personalize your social media page is integral if you want to be taken seriously. This means having a top notch timeline image for your Facebook page, or a slick personalized background on Twitter. Sticking with the default background will not get you noticed.

The Twitter background is also valuable real estate. Feel free to use both sides of the background to list important links to your website, special offers from your business, email contact information, and a personal photo of you (or logo of your business). It is a simple jpeg background, so nothing will be clickable. But you want to take advantage of this open area to fill it with interesting information.

5. Connect with Movers and Shakers

This is not the easiest task to accomplish, but you want to persistently attempt to connect with important people in your field. Meaningfully connecting with just a few can build your following in a hurry, just the way knowing important people in your daily life can help you get ahead.

I keep a close eye on the important social media connections related to my business. Whenever I see them post a problem they are trying to solve, or a question that is puzzling them, I always help them out provided I have the knowledge to make a difference. For instance, a well known graphic designer has a question about running batch scripts in Photoshop. I happen to be pretty good with Photoshop batch scripts. If I can help them out, I am instantly viewed as an important resource by them and all of their connections.

Conclusion

Building a strong presence in social media takes time, effort, and creativity. Buying your connections will not be meaningful to your online presence or your business, and it may even hurt your ranking within Google due to low engagement factors.

Be consistently producing engaging content, and always be on the lookout for important contacts to connect with. You can greatly speed the process of building a substantial following of your own, if you have great information to share and important people to share it with.

Keep wearing the White Hat, and Good Luck!

Daniel Padavona is the founder of Warmpicture Images, at www.warmpicture.com. Daniel enjoys blogging, photography, travel, and is loves Disney World in Florida. He lives with his family in Upstate New York, and enjoys connecting with designers and bloggers through social media.

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The Use Of Twitter For Social Media Promotion

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Want to reach thousands of people in a single click? Want to get your message out there informally without paying for expensive media campaigns and advertising? If this sounds like you, you are now in luck with social media being one of the main ways to promote your business quickly and effectively.

The advent of social media has completely changed the advertising and marketing industries with many companies attributing Facebook and Twitter to helping them in their success in business.

Twitter is one of the best and most popular options when it comes to social marketing and is an integral part of any marketing campaign, whether it is based solely on the web or not. By having a page on the social media platform companies instantly have an online presence and can communicate with thousands of people at the same time – a hard act for any other medium to follow.

Twitter allows anyone with an account to post messages up to 140 characters long to all their followers so if companies have a message, a motto or an event they want to publicise, they can do so, quickly and effectively through Twitter. If it is interesting, exciting or intriguing, people can choose to retweet it (one of the best twitter tools of all) to all their follows and within minutes it is possible for a simple message to go viral across the net until it is worldwide. Tweets should be well thought out, meaningful and memorable and if you have got that right the sky is the limit. Social media and Twitter in particular are changing every day with new marketing uses being found by the minute. This ever evolving platform allows you to keep up with not only your followers but other companies, their progress and their customer demographics. Essentially, Twitter opens up a world where you can monitor your competition, your market and your clients with the click of a button.

Relatively new companies have historically found it very difficult to get off the ground and rarely have the budget for the all singing, all dancing media campaigns needed to promote themselves and build brand awareness and recognition. However this is where Twitter comes into its own and is a powerful marketing tool which costs companies nothing. One clever message posted by the company can be picked up and multiplied the world over online, boosting their brand name and making them recognisable to the average person on the street. Twitter also has the unique ability to get potential customers out of their chair and inspired to make a call to a company they have heard of through a simple tweet. By including a Call to Action, followers are no longer a passive audience and have the option of reacting to your tweet whether it be to accept a special offer, give you a call or even agree or disagree to your statement. A strategic tweet can result in more followers and an interest surrounding not only the tweet itself but also the company, again boosting the profile.

Twitter Trends

Trends are also big news and a subject can become a Twitter trend if talked about enough on the site. Many businesses aim to create a new trend from a tweet which can last a day or a week depending on how strong it is and how popular it has become with tweeters. A company can hope for nothing better than their tweet becoming a worldwide trend and this can do wonders for their brand awareness.

Profit making companies are not the only ones who can benefit from Twitter as many charities have taken to the social media platform as a way to raise more money and get followers on board for charity events and fundraisers. By tweeting about an event or the need for more people to take part in a charity run, for example, the seed is sown in the minds of the public and awareness about that event has increased. It is also a fantastic medium for charities to express thanks to fundraisers and keep followers up to date on their progress.

There are some drawbacks to using Twitter as a marketing tool and these need to be considered carefully before a business decides to take the plunge and create their own account. As much as one tweet can make a business if done correctly, a tweet can also break if offensive, includes incorrect information or is slanderous to another person or business. You can’t take a tweet back and the minute you press that enter button it is live for everyone to see. Mistakes aren’t an option and every single tweet needs to be thought about carefully. You also need to be careful that your tweets don’t come across as spam with mind numbing advertising or offers being churned out every few hours. Your followers will soon turn off and you will be friendless before you know it.

So what makes Twitter better than its competitors. Social media sites are not a new concept and Twitter has actually come to the table relatively late in the day compared to many. What makes it unique is that Twitter is also the number one source of news for many people and offers a real time stream of information and news to users in their relative field. For many people it pays to be on the site and when users are in this mindset, it is relatively easy to get them excited about company news and offers without them being annoyed or irritated that, what is essentially advertising, has appeared on their screen.

So what about networking giant Facebook? The fact is that it tried the corporate route and failed. People want Facebook as a social platform to keep in touch with friends, they are not interested in being bombarded with campaigns and advertising. Many accounts are completely closed to anyone the user doesn’t consciously choose to add and so infiltrating consumers in the same way you can using Twitter is near impossible. There is a place for Facebook in viral campaigns but it is nowhere near as effective as twitter.

This article was written by Jenny B within the marketing department at Cancer Research UK, if you’re looking for charity jobs feel free to look online at their vacancies.

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