5 Ways Social Media Can Kill Your Brand

Everyone always talks about social media these days and how it has changed the way we live and the way we do business.  I tend to agree 100% on this.  It has made it easier to communicate with your customers and it has also made it easier for your customers to talk about you.  If done right, social media can turn your business around and help you grow your customer base to levels you have yet to reach.  However, if not done properly, it can kill your brand.  Here are 5 ways that social media can kill your brand.

1. Open Forum

Your customers now have an open forum to talk publicly about you and what you have done wrong.  Before a customer could write an online review of how bad your customer service was or how long it took to ship a product, but now that  complaint is going to spread faster and longer.  That 140 character tweet is now going to reach the followers of that customer and any others that it is RT by.  If they have their account linked to Facebook, now it is going to reach all of their friends on there as well.  Your company is now responsible for actions that you make.  How you handle them online is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful company.

2. Slow Response Time

If I have a quick question about an issue with a company that I am using, let’s say for example a hosting company, instead of e-mailing them, I will simply send them a message on Twitter and wait for a quick response.  Reason I do this is because there may be other customers out there with the same questions and same issues going on.  Also, in my mind it should be a quicker response then sitting in an incoming mailbox queue waiting for somebody to respond to it.  If you are monitoring your brand on social media, you will see that I just mentioned you in a question on Twitter and you should respond in a timely manner.  Companies that take a long time to respond on Twitter irritate me, it shows me that they are not using social media to their full advantage.

3. Bad Reactions

I wrote a post some time back about how NOT to react to a bad review.  No matter how good your product is, there will always be some bad reviews.  Simply because you can’t please everybody.  How you react to that bad review is a big sign of who you are as a company and as a person.  If you own your own company and you are doing the monitoring of social media outlets yourself, then you need to be able to keep your brand and your personal reactions in check.  If you respond to a bad review with an attitude or blame the customer, your brand is going to be shot down very quickly.  It is extremely difficult to try and recover from an incident as that.

4. You’re Not Even There

If you are not even monitoring social media outlets then you’re wrong.  I don’t care what business or industry you are in, you have customers and clients on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, everywhere.  You need to be there, bottom line.  If you’re not, you’re killing your brand by not listening to what your customers are saying about your or the industry you serve.

5. Lack of Useful Information

This can be summed up pretty easily, it’s not about YOU, it’s about your customers.  Put out information that is going to be useful to them.  If you sell custom paintings, send out a link about a local art show going on this weekend.  If all you send out in your social media outlets is information about sales and your product this and your product that, your customers are not always going to care about it.

Do not make any of these 5 mistakes and you will be able to survive in the social media world.
photo credit: Mark Kens via photopin cc