by D.J. Miller

If your business is going to thrive, it won’t be enough to have just a website and a blog; you’ll need a social media presence as well. But if you’re new to social media, you need to approach it the carefully. Mistakes made here could ruin your reputation for a long time. Consider the following pitfalls and avoid them.

Not Having a Plan

Anyone can join a social network, but to go into it without a plan is a waste of time and effort. Research how your social media presence can further your company marketing or customer service strategy. Know how social media works in order to come across positively and share this with your employees. Don’t do like an intern at a hotel chain that once given the competitor’s statistics posted them on Twitter. It made the employee — and the company — look petty. That’s not the sort of “social” muscle that will gain your company followers.

Anyone can join a social network, but to go into it without a plan is a waste of time and effort. Research how your social media presence can further your company marketing or customer service strategy. Know how social media works in order to come across positively and share this with your employees.

For example, don’t do like an intern at a hotel chain who posted a competitor’s unflattering statistics on Twitter. These statistics stated that the competitor had better numbers in general but also included a couple of key negative factors which the tweet highlighted. They were rated lower in customer satisfaction and the general friendliness of the staff than his hotel was.

This rubbing of the numbers in competitor’s face just made his company as a whole look immature and look like a bully in the industry. It made the employee (and his company) look petty. That’s not the sort of “social” muscle that will gain your company followers.

Buying Followers or “Likes”

People will know if you’re buying followers. Someone who shows up for the first time on Facebook or other social platform with a million followers is giving away what they’re really up to. Anyway, it’s a useless exercise.It isn’t the number of followers you have that builds your business; it’s the quality of the interactions that go on between you and those who show an interest. 150 enthusiastic, active followers are worth more to you than 1,500 fake ones. The entire concept behind social media is to build relationships with people, and you can’t fake that.

Misusing Video

There are plenty of opportunities to leverage the power of videos within the social community. There are video chat services and video sharing apps like Vine, Instagram and Skype. Don’t abuse this media; it damages you. Posting anything untrue or disparaging will come back to haunt you. Once it’s online, it’s online forever. Use video appropriately to build your brand, and you’ll meet with success.

Spamming

Spamming will be tempting because it will seem like an easy way to spread information quickly and cheaply, but spamming is a quick way to be hated and rejected. It’s okay to tweet about your latest blog entry several times in the day, but don’t overdo it. If you’re tweeting about it every hour, it’ll get noticed and quickly ignored. Likewise, avoid posting unsolicited links on other people’s pages. That’s just a case of bad manners and that won’t fly online any more than it would in the real world. (Links are solicited in forum comments, as a part of the identification of the one making the comment, by the way; so that’s OK.) Spamming is also a good way to get your account banned from most social networks.

Not Knowing the Rules

When you join social media networks, investigate each one’s little nuances and personality quirks. Each one has its own special language, abbreviations and markups. Remember, for example, that RT (“retweet”) is unique to Twitter, that marketing is hated on Reddit and that everything on LinkedIn must be professional sounding, not casual, intimate or abusive.

There’s a huge market that can be reached on the social media networks. You really can’t afford to ignore them. Since you’re going in, go in the right way. Learn what really works and stay away from social media faux pas that will ruin the end results you’re really after.

 

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