How’s Your So­cial Me­dia Strat­egy Work­ing Out?

The hype over so­cial me­dia has died down over the past few years. Which is ac­tu­ally a good thing be­cause we were com­pletely in­un­dated with ar­ti­cles tout­ing the phe­nom­e­non and mak­ing it sound like any busi­ness that didn’t get with the pro­gramme would im­me­di­ately go bank­rupt and have to close its doors.

De­spite all of these ex­pert ar­ti­cles, many small, medium and large busi­nesses didn’t leap onto the band­wagon and they didn’t seem to suf­fer for it.

And so the ev­i­dence prov­ing so­cial media’s im­por­tance started to arrive.

• So­cial me­dia has been linked to the top per­form­ing For­tune 100 com­pa­nies, with the very top per­form­ing com­pa­nies ac­tively par­tic­i­pat­ing in the so­cial sphere.
• It’s been linked to higher prof­its and in­creased cus­tomer loyalty.

It is, by all ac­counts, one of the best things your com­pany can do.

But there is one big chal­lenge: the so­cial me­dia attitude

It’s been there since the be­gin­ning and it’s not go­ing to go away. The chal­lenge is to tackle so­cial me­dia with the right at­ti­tude: The right at­ti­tude com­pris­ing en­thu­si­asm, pa­tience and com­mit­ment.

Un­for­tu­nately, many busi­nesses start with good in­ten­tions and then lose the plot af­ter a few months. They find that it is sim­ply too time con­sum­ing to keep their pages up­dated and to in­ter­act with vis­i­tors. Grad­u­ally they stop in­ter­act­ing and their so­cial me­dia pres­ence fades away.

Chal­lenge #2: Mak­ing a bad sit­u­a­tion worse

An­other prob­lem, ac­cord­ing to Matthew Pen­ey­cad (So­cial Me­dia To­day), is the neg­a­tive com­ments that come a business’s way. Own­ers take all the neg­a­tiv­ity to heart, and then they lose heart.

This is like cov­er­ing your eyes and hop­ing that no one will see you.

All you’ll do is in­crease frus­tra­tion, which will re­sult in even more (and even more ven­omous) com­ments. What’s more, the com­ments will not be re­served for your pages but will end up on per­sonal blogs, per­sonal time­lines and pos­si­bly even cus­tomer ser­vice sites.

Every so­cial me­dia com­plaint is a mar­ket­ing opportunity

The point is that you need to take the neg­a­tiv­ity to heart. Well, to a de­gree. You need to pay at­ten­tion to com­plaints so that you can im­prove your service.

You should also not view a com­plaint as a sin­gle un­happy cus­tomer. For every per­son who takes the time to reg­is­ter a com­plaint, there are be­tween 10 and 100 un­happy cus­tomers with ex­actly the same com­plaint, but who have elected to stew in rel­a­tive si­lence. And by rel­a­tive si­lence we mean that they do com­plain, but they keep it to their so­cial cir­cle. But, as their so­cial cir­cle is also likely to have var­i­ous so­cial me­dia ac­counts, news of un­hap­pi­ness quickly spreads.

You should view every com­plaint as a mar­ket­ing op­por­tu­nity. You can thank cus­tomers for their feed­back and re­as­sure them that you are tak­ing steps to en­sure that the prob­lem never re­curs. Noth­ing takes the wind out of in­dig­nant sails quite like a po­lite response.

It doesn’t stop there though. You re­ally do have to take steps to en­sure that the prob­lem never re­curs. You can’t ex­pect to get away with lip service.

Alas, all of this does take time. Which brings us back to the first challenge.

• The truth is that us­ing so­cial me­dia as a busi­ness does take time.
• It does take effort.

But, it’s far bet­ter to stick with it than to let it fall by the wayside!