In the new issue of Costco Connections, SBDC and CITD staff came across a list of tips from the VP of American Express OPEN on using social media. These five quick tips are good to keep in mind as you enter the world of social media, or if you have been tweeting for years.
1. Don’t ignore the competition. Google and Twitter both offer services which can alert you when a keyword of your choice is mentioned online.
2. Don’t ignore what your customers are saying. Twitter and Yelp are a great way to hear everything your customers are saying about your business, good and bad. And they make it easy to contact the customer to make things right. In public.
3. Remain professional. Admit your mistakes, but don’t lose your cool. Customers judge your business by how you respond.
4. Fulfill your commitments. Social media is an easy way for customers to complain when you don’t live up to your end of a deal.
5. Don’t waste your time. Try out social media sites like fourquare or twitter as a consumer first. Then if you think it will work, sign up as a business owner.
Thanks for this… short and sweet and just what I needed to hear/read!
I love the last item on your tips. I think that social media is a break it or lose it deal — you either break it and be a huge hit, or lose it and be the biggest failure that the fail blog has ever known. Small business owners should not just run blindly into social media as if they’re running against an invisible wall. A policy must be in place to make sure that the brand message is imparted clearly to your audience or else, the effort is a huge waste ( time, money, etc ). Thanks for the tips, anyway!
I like point #4. If you want to leverage the power of social media to get your message out there, you have to understand that everyone gets their say too. A company should have a strategy in place for how to deal with complaints that are posted for all the world to see. Just ignoring them isn’t a solution. Resolving them privately isn’t enough. There needs to be transparency about how customers problems are being addressed and solved. This can actually end up making a company look better if they know how to be responsive in a social media forum.
Daisy McCarty