More and more small businesses of today are discovering how social media plays a significant part in their business brand identity. Having a strong online presence can give small businesses more exposure and greater success. Blogging, posting pictures, publishing updates, and interacting with prospective clients online are all excellent ways to help promote your business and its products or services. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram have an enormous community outreach, and failure to learn the correct etiquette for these social media channels can be disastrous to the success of your brand.
Here are some things to keep in mind when using social media for your business.
Understand the platform you’re posting: For example, on Twitter, you can post several times a day, while the same behaviour is considered spammy on another platform such as Facebook or LinkedIn. On Facebook, hashtags are widely considered as annoying.
Think before tagging: Don’t tag your friends in videos, photos, check-ins and status updates without their permission. Tagging people when they don’t want to be tagged will annoy them and get them to unfollow your posts. Remember, by tagging someone, you create more work for that person.
Overusing Hashtags: The right hashtags can be significant. And they can be extremely beneficial to any business when used strategically. Misusing it in a post can annoy your followers. Stick to using them where you know they’ll have a more significant impact on your audience.
Don’t Talk About Your Business on Your Personal Facebook Profile: Of Course, you can talk about your life on Facebook, including sharing your latest business announcements. However, using your personal Facebook profile to promote your business constantly and spamming your friends and family isn’t always great. Using your personal profile as a business page violates Facebook’s “terms of service.”
Stay away from purchasing likes/followers: While buying likes and followers increases your numbers on social media, it does not equal to sales for your business. Social media is about building relationships with your clients. If you do that first, the likes and follows will come.
Create Customized Content for Each Platform: Not all Social platforms are the same, and this includes content appearance. Instead of cross-posting your content in the same exact format on all your platforms, consider a different approach. Try sharing the same content but just formatting it differently for each platform.
Don’t let sloppy posts damage your business’s image. Follow these rules so you can work out how to interact with your followers effectively.
Which rules do you see broken? Which are news to you?