Random Tips to Manage your Business' Reputation on Social Media

If you want to quickly build a reputation for your business, get it on social media. Social media aside from being a very suitable place for your business to post ads and promotions, just as the name applies, it is also one great place to socialize. Because of the huge popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can get to quickly build a large community of followers/friends. That becomes a great social media asset for your business. Through it, your followers/friends easily interact and engage with your brand by way of comments, reviews, feedback and asking questions. That helps to enhance your business reputation in no small measure. If you take positive proactive steps to manage your business’ reputation on social media, you can easily build a stronger relationship with your customers through whom you can generate positive word-of-mouth promo for your brand. Here's what you can do. 

Highlight and Promote Positive Reviews

If you market on social media, always keep an eye on reviews and testimonials from any of the platforms you have an account on. What you do with these reviews/testimonials (even if negative), can go a long way to help your online reputation management efforts. You can respond directly to reviews or you use them as user-generated content to build trust and your business reputation. This is because user-generated content is by far more persuasive to potential customers and as a result, does more to establish your reputation better than most other promotional activities. This gets better when you factor in that you can easily share reviews and testimonials very widely on social media platforms. Most digital marketers are aware that a very large percentage of consumers rely on online reviews to make their buy decisions. It is smart social media marketing therefore to always take a proactive approach to reputation management to ensure that you’re making the right impression on these prospective customers. With quality reputation management, business owners take control of the narrative surrounding their brands. Doing so helps them to post such great results that ensure positive actual growths in their businesses.

Respond Promptly to Comments and Reviews

On social media, when brands respond promptly to customer reviews, they send a positive message which demonstrates their commitment to customer service. That helps brands to create a positive image, more so when such responses relate to negative reviews. A positive, personalized response to reviews goes a long way to shape a positive narrative for the brand. This is more so when you factor in that social platforms are often where customers go to share their experiences with brands. If these customers leave reviews, a prompt response is imperative, to enhance your business reputation. As a business owner, if you give a positive response that adequately addresses your customer’s concern or complaints, it clearly demonstrates to others who might read the review that your brand takes customer service seriously. Doing so helps your business reputation positively thereby avoiding losing good customers unnecessarily in the bargain.

Diligently Track all Conversations about Your Brand

Every second, every hour, every day, countless conversations are taking place on social media. It is always a very huge challenge for most businesses to decipher which of these conversations relate directly to their brands. How then can you find the conversations that relate to your brand? Simple, through diligent tracking! Doing this manually however is a very daunting task. Online social listening tools help businesses to solve this problem. By using these tools effectively, it is pretty difficult for businesses to miss out on any online conversation involving their brands. Online social listening tools like HootSuite help businesses to track branded keywords even if such brands are not tagged by name. With these tools, business owners do not need to search through social media manually (even if that is feasible), since the tools provide direct notifications when a conversation about your brand is taking place on social media platforms. This allows business owners to easily gauge the overall sentiment surrounding their brands on social media. It provides them great opportunities to step up and engage directly with customers. A move that no doubt helps their business’ reputations a great deal!

6 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Social media marketing is hugely popular with business owners. Nearly everyone actually wants their business on social media because of its popularity and ease of social media marketing activities. As a result of inexperience, many marketers tend to make avoidable mistakes when marketing on social media. Such mistakes stem from creating good content, sharing it online and engaging with social media communities. If you manage to avoid these social media marketing mistakes, your online business will do better even amidst the huge competition in digital space. 

If you are desirous to make some appreciable success in your social media marketing activities, here are six of the commonest mistakes you can do well to avoid.

1. Creating Content for Yourself

Many businesses are on social media posting only content they like not what their audience likes. That is a mistake. Content that helps to grow your business is the type of content your audience likes and appreciates. It is such content that gets them hooked up to you and your business because you are regularly giving them what they like to see and read. If you focus more on topics you are knowledgeable about and tailor your content to meet what your audience yearns for, the content serves a great marketing purpose. From your audience feedback and FAQs, it is easy to gauge what your audience wants to know. Creating content that answers questions/concerns from your audience is the best way to provide definite value for them. Such content is what helps to get good results for your business.
 
2. Random Postings

Posting content randomly is a great marketing mistake. What your business needs is consistent and regular content postings since social media algorithms tend to favor consistency in terms of both the number of posts and the type of content you regularly share. Aside from this, if your audience knows what content they expect from you, it helps them to connect better with your business.

3. Not Engaging Enough

When your social media content is not engaging enough, your audience/community cannot grow fast enough. Sporadic posting just for the sake of it never gives good results on social media. What works is what manages to get your audience engaged. You must never lose sight of the fact that social media platforms are primarily meant to cultivate useful social interactions among all shades of people. It helps brands to cultivate strong online presence. For most brands, such connections are the key to long-term relationships which generate leads and sales. Social media helps you to build a valuable audience free of cost provided you do your part to post high value engaging content regularly.
 
4. Absence of Calls-To-Action, CTAs

If you plan your content well enough and the quality manages to provide real value to your audience, it is great for your business. A follow up of such content with an appropriate CTA is great for selling your products/services. If a CTA is absent, many consumers may just read your content and move away. That is a great business opportunity lost. By placing a good CTA at the beginning or end of your content post, it tells your audience the immediate action you want them to take after reading your post. If this CTA is short, inviting and to the point, the audience acts appropriately. A good CTA helps consumers to make their buy decisions and to purchase from your business.

5. Not Editing Photos and Videos

The average human being easily gets attracted to visuals. Good products photos and how-to videos accompanying your content are good for business. With a lot of bad images out there on the internet, it is bad for business to add just about any photos/videos in your content. If you are not taking photos or shooting videos by yourself, be sure that any photos/videos you admit in your content are well edited to match your marketing message. Even if you are not a professional photographer or videographer, you can use online tools to tweak a few things up to make your marketing images/videos look much better.
 
6. Ignoring Direct Messages

If you want to connect easily with your audience on social media, never ignore Direct Messages, DMs from them. Ignoring DMs or comments from your audience is an indirect way of telling them they don’t count. And, that you don’t really care about them or whatever they have to say to you about your business. If you want to benefit well from social media marketing, you must spend quality time daily to engage with your audience, answering questions, and checking your direct messages. Sometimes, there are great questions and business opportunities you are likely to miss if you ignore DMs from your audience.