Social media networks are a great way to gain exposure for your brand. However, if you aren’t careful, you can also tarnish your reputation with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. To ensure you stay on the good side of the public eye, refrain from doing the following six things!
Only sharing your own content
Social marketing is about a give and take. You don’t want to only promote your own blog posts or products. Make sure you are sharing related content in your niche from other bloggers and marketers. Offering the best information out there, whether it is your own or not, helps elevate you as an expert.
Plus, if you scratch the back of other marketers, they will likely scratch yours by sharing your content too!
Being rude or unprofessional
It’s never a good idea to be rude to your social media network. Even if you spout off something negative and then later delete it, screenshots will allow it to live forever.
Always be courteous and respectful when dealing with disgruntled followers. Avoid slamming any products or fellow marketers on your social media channels. For negative blog comments, take the high road and thank them for their opinion but don’t engage with them further.
Not engaging with comments or questions
If you never take the time to answer your followers’ questions, comments, or concerns, you may not appear to be genuine. Engagement is an important step in being real and personable online. Make sure you reply to your followers in a timely manner. If you run multiple pages and struggle to answer everyone within 24 hours, it may be time to hire a virtual assistant to do it for you!
Not being consistent with updates
It’s essential to keep your social media accounts updated on a regular basis. This can be done manually, though it is recommended that you use a scheduling tool to send regular statuses, updates, and pins to your accounts. These updates can be scheduled with tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Tailwind.
Your posts are always mundane
Boring posts won’t exactly ruin your reputation, but it will make it difficult to encourage engagement. Bland updates that don’t really show your personality aren’t helpful to your business – and in fact, you are wasting your time by sharing them. Be real in your updates while still maintaining a level of professionalism.
Oversharing about your life
While it’s a good idea to be a real person on the Internet, you must know where to draw in line in sharing your personal life. Your followers don’t need to know that you are hungover today from an all-night rager yesterday. Avoid sharing too many details about what you do in your offline world – oh, and don’t go overboard with selfies either!
As you can see there are some mistakes you want to avoid in order to maintain your reputation online. Committing these actions can have serious consequences for your presence on the World Wide Web if you aren’t careful – and it’s much easier to maintain your rep than it is to fix it after it’s been tarnished.
