Social media is a great place to create a positive image of your brand, however, there are some key mistakes businesses make that hurt more than help. First of all, never bash your competition. Focus on positive things about your own business and what great services you have to offer. Don’t be afraid to even take it a step further and join in on constructive conversations with competitors and complimentary businesses. This will make you appear unselfish, involved, and willing to connect with other people, which are all good attributes for your company to have.
Business too often get tunnel vision when it comes to social media and only associate it with marketing. Being truly effective on social media is less about advertising and more to do with creating bonds and connecting with your customers. No one gets on social media to have advertisements shoved down their throat, they come to connect with people and gather information. Therefore, get to know your customers and post content that would appeal to them, and once they feel you as a business care about them, they will be much more welcoming to the advertisements you do post. Try to limit the posts about to your business to only 1/3 of your content. Remember that people use different sites for different reasons so make sure your posts are staying true to the site you’re posting on. Because of this, avoid positing the same thing across multiple platforms. Your posts should be diverse in content and diverse in timing depending on the site you’re using.
Take every opportunity on social media as an opportunity to improve your brand’s image. Never argue with customers, use negative feedback as a learning experience. Respond to that negative feedback quickly and with a willingness to solve the problem. Actions like these will not only show that person you are willing to resolve the issue, but also lets other customers see you’re committed to improving as a business. Customers want to deal with genuine and authentic businesses, therefore, buying followers or likes on your content is never a good idea. Not only does it show a lack of authenticity with customers, but it throws of your analytics completely and doesn’t lead to any, if not less, increase in revenue. Also, the FTC has it’s own set of do’s and don’ts in place for social media, brush up on those to make sure you’re staying legal or lookout for our episode on FTC guidelines.
This is a marked difference from the Vine app Twitter released a few years ago where you can record up to 15 seconds of video then share it out to your followers to watch. Meerkat is live video. Real time activity. People that follow your stream can even send you comments that you and the other viewers can see and discuss.
In Periscope you can watch people’s videos, comment to them and others watching as well as hit a button to offer hearts or “love” to the person making the video. These videos are actually saved for up to 24 hours so you can go back and watch them later too. There is a lot more interaction between the watchers of the video and the producer of the video here. Periscope is a great way to offer Q & A sessions and offer the opportunity to allow people to learn more about your business.