Is your brand active on social media? The avenue’s meteoric rise in popularity almost dictates it. By failing to maximize on social media as an avenue for advertising, you could lag behind others in your field. There is room for all types of brands on social media, regardless of their size and scope.
The successful use of social media as an avenue for marketing is not always guaranteed, however. Since it a social platform first and foremost, it can be difficult to carry out marketing without a strategic guide. Brands have to create exciting and attractive content to appeal to their followers’ interest and maintain a relationship in order to successfully market products or services. They should also maintain decent levels of activity, as well as provide sufficient customer service through the platform.
Mistakes can be costly on the platform, with consequences being felt beyond the virtual limits. It is not uncommon for brands to harm their relationship with offline customers because of their online activity. In order to take advantage of social media to grow your brand and reduce the risk of a backlash to your reputation, these are some common mistakes to avoid.
Failing to customize your pages
The number of people using social media to research a brand is on the rise. Before making a purchase, users will find out more about a brand by looking it up on relevant platforms. If your page does not offer comprehensive information, such as contact and location information, they may be less likely to engage with your brand beyond their search. In order to earn users’ trust and help present your brand in a desired way, you should make sure to customize different aspects of your pages.
Customized pages across multiple social media platforms will build an identity which users will be likely able to relate to. You should consider adding similar information across multiple platforms to provide a uniformity that will increase their ability to trust other pages not on their preferred social platforms for maximum value to your brand.
Failing to set up a post scheduler
With your brand’s reputation at stake, it is important to scrutinize every post to ensure it meets your expectations. Even though you cannot dictate how social media users will react to posts by your brand, maintaining a framework to assess content will help protect your reputation from damage even as a result of unlikely slip ups. Since this may require a bit of time, it could be crucial to use a post scheduler across different platforms. This will help maintain preferable levels of activity for your social media pages, helping keep your followers interested in them. You could consider schedulers such as HootSuite to make sure you never miss a post.
If you are not interested in a post scheduler, you need to develop content for at least weeks in advance to avoid social media inactivity.You may also need to detail out the highest user activity times for maximum impact.
Overstretching their capacity
You should assess your social media management capacity before signing up. Do you have enough people to manage your activity across a number of platforms? Will your team handle engagement and interaction across all platforms of interest? If the answer is no, you might be better off scaling down your plan to a comfortable number of social platforms. This will help you build a personalized relationship with your followers, which is crucial to personal selling. By overstretching your capacity, you may injure your reputation by coming off as indifferent to the needs of your followers.
The rule of thumb dictates that you need to have at least one team member on each social media platform, with at least two others who are open to providing cover for any significant increase in user engagement levels. This will ensure you never miss a complaint or comment and build your clients’ trust.
Ignoring negative comments
On such a large platform, it is inevitable that some users will have negative responses and reactions to your products, services or posts. Due to the increased anonymity and lack of accountability, many users will even purposefully engage negatively with your brand. Instead of ignoring these interactions, you could leverage them to provide benefit to your brand.
But why is ignoring them so dangerous? For starters, it does little to assure other potential clients of receiving help in future from your brand. It also presents undesirable brand values, such as the lack of responsibility towards clients. So how can you take advantage of these comments? By taking up a solution-oriented approach, and maintaining professionalism in your interactions, you will be able to develop a notion that you care about your clients’ interest which is crucial to maintaining their interest in your brand.
Following other blueprints to success
You need to develop a social media framework that suits the needs of your brand. Even though you may consider incorporating features that proved to be successful by other brands, you should keep in mind your specific brand goals when taking up social media marketing and advertising. Different brands will engage in strategies unique to their needs, and their success might not necessarily be your desired target. You could consider paid marketing, such as auto comments for instagram, to grow interest in your brand.
For instance, even though a leading brand’s campaign is popular on social media, using it to develop your own will not guarantee success. In fact, users could see right through your plagiaristic efforts and deem your brand as non-committal towards developing valuable and specialized content, as opposed to targeting maximum returns. By appearing to chase clout on social media, your brand may never succeed in building it.
Final word
You may address your reputation through online reputation management efforts in the event that your brand’ssocial media activity has an impact on it.It is better to be safe than sorry, however, since there is no guarantee that your brand will completely recover from the potential damage caused. This guide should keep you well in control of your activity to avoid any such potential occurrences.
