Just a few tweaks to your social plans and practices can stop your company from bleeding customers. Consistency and creativity are a big part of the changes companies must make.
Being “successful” with your personal social media doesn’t mean you know how to replicate those results for a business–and you probably wouldn’t want to. What gives you a personal following on a social network is not the same as what might bring the samesuccess for a business.Onetrick is to generate ideas you might do for fun and then adapt them for the more formal business account. Just because you got a lot of likes for that spring break bikini photo or a shot of your pet rabbit, doesn’t mean you canuse the same tactics to drum up business for a new tech startup. Businesses make many common mistakes when it comes to social media, but here are some of the biggest ones.
1. What social media policy?
If your business is going to use social media, you need to have a written policy in place, as well as employee buy-in. According to social media strategist Brandon Harig of Identify, “Companies who fail to provide guidelines for how their employees should conduct themselves online are dealing with a ticking time bomb.” This means that even if your business isn’t on social media, your employees probably are. You need to have an agreement with them in writing. This is partly why you see lines such as “tweets are my own” in the Twitter bios of many prominent company employees.
2. Thinking nobody reads the bio
This leads us right into how many businesses fail to complete all parts of their social media profiles. This is both lazy and probably costing you customers. Many people are reading your bio to find out more about you. Plus, these bios can be search engine optimization (SEO) gold, and failing to complete them with applicable keywords means you’re opting out of potential higher rankings. Now that Google+ is becoming a kind ofYellow Pages of the Internet, you’ll want to make sure your business bio there is as complete as possible. Tyler Brown, social media specialist at Checks-Superstore.com, “Make sure to include your physical address, URL and depending on space, up to a couple of paragraphs about company history and current mission.”
Read the full article here: http://www.inc.com/john-boitnott/5-social-media-mistakes-that-cost-you-customers-every-day.html
