There are many mistakes that can be made when using social media as an outlet to market your brand and to connect with people. Many mistakes can be rectified in the eyes of your audience, fortunately mistakes only help humanize a brand and often many of us have damage control in place when it comes to any negative sentiment that may be displayed on your social networks.
This is beyond a few bad words towards your brand, the types of mistakes that can make a huge dent in the reputation of your business are:
1. Disregarding your Audience
Sure, you run all of your social networks but the true owners of your social sites are your audience, believing anything otherwise is a huge mistake. If you are not incorporating them within your promotions, campaigns or deals you are making your first huge mistake. Of course you want to appeal to the masses but not neutralizing your brand by directing them towards your audience most certainly will not look appealing. The audience of your social sites are your advocates; do not make the mistake of overlooking them.
2. Not Using Insights to Market Your Brand
We often take for granted the free data that we can accumulate and use to target out very own demographic that is made up of the people who either like, follow or subscribe and +1 or circle your brand. Using analytics to precisely target people within your local area can help not only optimize your brand’s identity on the web but within your very own community.
3. Ignoring your Most Loyal Customers
Whether it is your most loyal customers to your most engaging audience members you must idolize them to keep them being loyal. If you have promotions than they should be the first to see them or to be offered the deal prior to the masses and let them know that their exclusivity is due to their interactions or loyalty to your business. Making those who stick by you feel special needs to be a priority or you are missing out on one of the most crucial forms of keeping your brand relevant.
4. Not Hiring from Within your Audience
If you are in need of hiring someone your biggest mistake would be to overlook someone who is already an active member within your online community. Those people who already share your brands news and entertaining content for free can be a great ally to have hired on as a part of your employed team. Announce your position to your audience and if you receive people who fit your credentials and you do not hire them can hurt the moral of your audience, especially if you do an open hiring for them to reply on your YouTube channel with an audition video or any other public forum. Your audience watches and if popular members get turned away and hired instead by an unknown person to the community, your audience will see this negatively and this is one decision that can hurt your brand, the idea is smart, but the outcome needs to be smarter for the overall community that participates. A popular engaging member will only keep the audience flowing with support and that will all fall under your brand.
These 4 tips can help you learn how not to hinder yourself when utilizing social media for your business. You need to be cautious at all times even when you are having fun, remember cautious is different than paranoid, but always weighing the possible outcomes of your online activities is good practice.
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