Social media is a powerful tool that can help your business grow exponentially. In fact, not leveraging social media for business growth in this day and age is unheard-of. However, social media can also be your business’s hindrance to success. In worst cases, it can even be your business’s downfall.
With how fast information can travel nowadays, the phrase “think twice before you post” is now truer than ever, especially for businesses. A single bad post can blow up and tarnish the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build, possibly even forever. And it can only take just one; just one post that can spark Internet rage on your business and put all those search engine optimization services to waste.
With all this in mind, think twice or even thrice before posting on your business’s social media platforms. More importantly, be careful not to post these kinds of content:
1. Excessive overly promotional content
The main point of using social media is to increase brand awareness and promote your products and services. However, customers don’t want to read overly promotional content over and over again. Sure, a promo post is perfectly okay once in a while, but customers will sooner get sick of them than actually doing business with you. It will make them feel that your brand is just in it to promote, and not bring actual value to its audiences.
2. Negative posts about customers
It can be tempting to unload your frustrations on a customer or client by posting about them on social media, especially if they are leaving negative feedback that everyone else can see. However, this can do more harm than good, causing other customers to be dissatisfied with your brand with how poorly you handle negative feedback.
A growing trend in the social media sphere right now is brands replying snarkily at their customers to express humor and exhibit a more relatable persona. However, this can totally backfire if you’re not careful about it. To stay safe, refrain from posting anything negative about or to a customer. Instead, handle the problem privately and treat negative feedback as a customer service opportunity.
If, however, the customer is posting unjust negative feedback or is trolling your page, it may be a good idea to delete or report the post.
3. Religious or political posts
Posting about religious or political issues can be a great way to connect with your audience, but it can also be a reason for a divide between you and viewers that don’t agree with your opinions. For instance, showing your support for a minority can send the message that your brand is all for fair treatment of others, regardless of their race, gender, or religion, and people that don’t agree with your positive opinions may be better off doing business somewhere else anyway.
However, the opposite is often true for conservative or negative posts about politics, religion, sexuality, and social issues. Refrain from posting any kind of negative content about these things, regardless if the majority of your audience agrees with your opinion. Better yet, sense-check each one of your posts that contain potentially controversial content.
4. Unattributed or unaccredited content
When using any other piece of work that you do not fully own, don’t forget to include credits or attributions to your post. Otherwise, the original owner could sue you for copyright infringement or, at the very least, post negative feedback about your business on their own social media pages. If they have a significant following, it could very well mean a lot of hate for your brand.
That said, be sure that your content creators know proper crediting and attribution procedures. If they must lift art, pictures, video clips, text, or any other piece of intellectual property somewhere else, they must know how to credit and attribute properly.
5. Too many hashtags
Hashtags can increase your visibility, helping you grow your following and expand brand awareness. For this reason, a lot of businesses tend to fill their posts with too many hashtags to take full advantage of this tactic, even going as far as including irrelevant hashtags just because they are popular.
Don’t make the same mistake. If you want to include hashtags in a post, select only the most ones most relevant to your content. Furthermore, create a combination of big and small hashtags. Posting with only hashtags that have huge followings can make it difficult for you to stand out among a million other posts, while hashtags with only a few thousand posts may not get you any attention at all.
Leveraging social media is one of the most effective marketing tools for any business, but only when it’s done right. If you want to make the most out of your social media pages, avoid posting these types of content, and most importantly, think thrice before posting anything on your feeds.
