Use social media marketing to grow your business, not to ruin it.
While social media marketing can help you effectively promote your business, generate sales leads, develop brand loyalty, provide valuable insight on your market and increase your profits for a minimal cost, it can also affect your business negatively ? if you don’t know how to use it properly.
So, is there anything you can do to avoid these potential glitches? Well, yes. You have the power to steer your social marketing efforts in the right direction and avoid running into any trouble. Here’s how you do it.
Make it a sacred commitment. Social media marketing will only work if you take the time to establish long-term relationships with your customers. As such, you need to have someone to post valuable content, respond to comments and monitor your networks on a regular basis.
Know your ROI. While most social media tools are free to use, setting up a social marketing campaign is far from being free. You need to devote a lot of time, effort and commitment for your social media efforts to bear fruits. To determine whether your efforts are paying off, you should take a look at your ROI, particularly your sales conversion rates. Did you notice a positive change? Is it significantly higher than the time investment you have put into your social marketing campaign? If it is, then you can be sure that you are doing it right.
Keep your employees in line. Negative feedback and unsuitable comments from your employees can seriously damage your reputation. It can happen to you if you don’t keep your employees in line. Avoid such situations by clearly setting the rules and assign someone to monitor your employees’ activities online.
Deal with negative comments. Keep in mind that you cannot please everyone. There will always be someone who will say something negative about you and/or your products. What should you do when this happens? Well, the best thing for you to do is to deal with it. Answer complaints with facts to quickly address the issue and prevent false rumors from spreading. Don’t try to delete negative comments since this will only lead dissatisfied customers to vent their ire elsewhere. ? ?
Be on the lookout for hidden agendas. Your competitors, customers and even your employees may use the veil of anonymity to support their hidden agendas. It is not uncommon for competitors to pose themselves as members of your community to get some inside information about your business plans or post negative comments that can ruin your credibility. Customers may use numerous personas just to coax you into developing and incorporating a new feature into your products. Your employees may also use the same tactics to ensure that their pet projects will be favored by the product development department.
Social media marketing can be an invaluable tool in growing your business but you need to make sure that you are doing it right to avoid encountering any problems.
