If you have been reading the past series of our blog post then by now you are probably convinced that having a social media page is really beneficial, there are risks involved in having a social media presence for individuals and businesses alike. Having a social media presence means you are leaving your brand exposed and vulnerable to attacks, social media unlike your website is not your turf therefore sometimes it is out of control and hard to protect your brand from abuse. Social listening and social media management can help but there is no denying that social media has three faces, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Since we have discussed the benefits of social media in past blogs, they are just going to be identified as the great side, please click to read if you missed it. The bad and ugly sides will be discussed below.
The Good: Benefit
- Brand exposure to prospects
- Consumer engagement
- Promote seasonal sales
- Give a face/ personality to your brand
- Address issues and queries
- Develop brand loyal.
- Drive brand advocacy
- Customers can find you through new channels, generating more leads
- Establish an online presence
Bad Side: Down effects
As there are benefits of using social media, there are the down effects of using it for your business;
- The need to commit resources to managing your social media presence, responding to feedback and producing new content makes social media time-intensive.
- Following or liking the wrong person or brand could give a negative image of your brand to your customers or prospects. If your followers do not support your view on things, or object the brand or person you like, they might disassociate with you making you lose consumers and prospects.
- Your employees are part of your brand, therefore if they made a bad or an unacceptable comment, it might reflect on your brand.
Late 2013, daily mail had a report on a public relations executive who posted an offensive comment on twitter which got her fired. Click to read the full report.
- Ineffective use of social media such as using it to push for sales without engaging with customers may damage a brand’s reputation.
Ugly Side:
Social media can be very disastrous if used wrongly or carelessly, this may result in a damaged reputation of the company, and unlike the down effect, it might be hard to control the effect that it ends up viral. Listed below are some examples of the careless use of social media;
- The #hashtag mishaps: A #hashtag is used to start a topic or set a trend on social media. Therefore when companies want to start a trend on social media, they often use an #hashtag in order to get their names in front of most people. Sometimes, they use the #hashtag without checking if it’s being used and why, and end up hijacking other people’s trends which might be found offensive and careless.
Here is a report on how the brand owner of Kenneth Cole fashion design annoyed a lot of people on the internet for being insensitive due to his carelessness.
- Fighting and being disrespecting to fans on social media pages can be as disastrous. In 2010, Greenpeace accused nestle of using palm oil from Indonesia in their chocolate and asked people to boycott them. Nestle got very defensive here
- Deleting negative comments, it didn’t help nestle, and it would hardly help any other company, instead it would draw criticism.
- Lying and hiding, not commenting when the brand is in “social media trouble” hoping it would go away is the worst thing a brand can do because the trouble doesn’t go away rather it escalates. Commenting immediately help people here your side of the story.
DOS AND DON’TS
- Do realize the users are always right and apologize immediately if you have offended anyone
- Don’t fight users online
- Do have a crisis plan for social media
- Do create cost effective strategies and campaigns that can create viral results
- Don’t run and hide
- Do think before you address the problem so you do not make it worse.
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Written by Elizabeth @SwoopStudios
