8 Social Media Marketing Dos and Don’ts

Nothing is what happens when you go through the motions instead of utilizing social media to advance the goals of your product or organization. Below are the most essential actions and the most common mistakes organizations make.
1. Do Make a Social Media Plan. You need to decide first what you’ll post (both words and images), how often to schedule your posts, what “brand voice” and “brand design or look” you’ll use and who’ll keep your profiles up to date.
2. Don’t Let your accounts fall by the wayside. The fundamental sin of social media is not keeping to a routine schedule of updates.

3. Do broadcast and Do not chat. Your presence on social media is about conversation and visibility. If you’re blasting messages into either the wrong venue or target, you’re missing the benefits of engagement.

4. Do respond quickly. One recent survey showed that a third of customers who contacted businesses through social channels expected a response within half an hour, regardless of the hour.

5. Do not use social media as advertising vehicles. It’s like spam. Your customers will tune you out.

6. Do not auto-post the same message across all media. This may have made sense back when Facebook, Twitter and the rest were new, but they’ve evolved into distinctly different formats that rarely produce optimal results if you treat them the same way.

7. Do not ignore or delete negative comments. Not only will you irritate the customers who posted them, but you’ll lose a valuable opportunity to clarify, defend your comment, explain what happened, express regret, or try to rectify the situation and turn it around.

8. Do measure your return on investment. Social media interactions are eminently trackable. You can monitor without much trouble which conversations, contests and offers are generating the most buzz.