Social media has tremendous power, especially for businesses. It allows you to build a relationship with your audience and generate leads. While it provides an easy and convenient way to connect with your audience, this connectivity carries risks.
In order to ensure that your business creates a respectful, valuable, and welcomed presence on social media, it is important to adhere to the etiquette. Keep in mind that social media is a public forum. One small mistake can have a negative effect on your brand’s reputation. A careless Facebook post or tweet can spiral into a full-blown crisis.
Here is some basic social media etiquette for businesses to help you get started.
Build a positive social media image
Social media provides the perfect platform for you to get maximum exposure and strengthen your brand image.
Building a positive social media image means building a reputation. The best way to do this is to build a relationship with your audience. Create content that would get people talking. Make sure to respond to messages and comments to keep the conversation going.
Spread positivity by sharing uplifting content and inspirational news. Celebrate your wins and spotlight your employees on social media. This puts your company or organization in a good light by showing your audience that you care about your people.
Avoid over-sharing
Consistency is the key to social media success. You need to have a posting schedule and stick to it. Your audience will forget that you exist if you don’t post regularly. However, posting too often can annoy your fans and followers.
According to studies, one or two posts a day is enough to maintain an active presence on social media. This will help keep you relevant without becoming a nuisance. You are likely to see a 50% drop in engagement per post if you post 3 times or more per day.
Be self-centered in small doses
Most businesses use social media to provide their audience with updates about their business. Often, they use it to advertise their products and services. Although it’s fine to use social to promote your business, make sure that you encourage two-way communication. Don’t just bombard people with promotions, updates, and advertisements, communicate with them.
Use social media to engage your audience. If you want people to buy your products or use your services, you need to gain their trust. To do that, you first need to build a relationship with them. Strike a balance between entertaining, informative, and promotional to keep your audience engaged. Also, encourage people to comment on your posts and join in on the discussion. Ask questions, respond to their comments, share user-generated content.
Creating a social media calendar will not only help you plan and visualize your social media content but will also prevent you from publishing poorly written content.
Tame your hashtags
Hashtags can be quite beneficial to your social media marketing plan. They can help put your content in front of people and expand your reach. They can be advantageous as long as you don’t go overboard. But if you use too much of them, they can be distracting. It can also make you look desperate.
Just because you can use 30 hashtags on Instagram, it doesn’t mean you should Use hashtags wisely. To make sure that you get more engagement, choose hashtags that are relevant to your business. For best results, create a unique hashtag for your business.
Don’t badmouth your competition
Some businesses badmouth their competitors in the hopes of discrediting them. However, this can do more harm than good to your business. You probably already hate your competitors, but bashing them makes you look silly and childish.
Focus on the great things about your business and keep the conversations positive. As the old adage goes, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”
