Boost your business reputation with social media

Social media has become of the most important marketing channels for any business. Having a good online social media presence not only helps with your SEO and getting to the top of Google, but it also improves your business reputation as customers see you as a company that they know and trust.

Having people tweet, post and connect with you also increases your brand awareness so that lots more people hear about your company and are interested in what you do. Using social media to build relationships, gauge market perceptions and share information is a great route to business success.

Sounds good doesn’t it? But you can only achieve these dizzy heights if you know how to manage social media. And manage it, you must. For out of control social media has the potential to do the exact opposite of what you intended it to do, remember the footballer we’re not allowed to talk about?

In order to ensure that your social media is working for, not against you, it is essential that:-

• Your organisation has a social media policy describing what your employees are/are not allowed to do/mention on social media
• There is a clear line of  responsibility within your organisation for monitoring the social media tweets, retweets and answering questions and set timeframes with which to attend to these things
• If your employees are using your organisation’s social media pages to tweet and post you have provided social media guidelines which cover tone of voice, types of things to tweet/post etc
• Negative feedback, comments, replies are handled immediately or as soon as possible. The best way to get bad publicity from social media is to ignore any type of criticism
• Your organisation is positioned as a ‘thought leader’ within your field. The more advice, comments, opinions and information you can give about your specialist field, the better

• You get known for giving out more useful information than for churning out sales and marketing messages. The rule of thumb is 1 commercial message to every 10-15 other types of message
• You ask questions of your audience to engage and have conversations with them. In this way you can find out current trends, gauge public opinion and gather market intelligence
• You are transparent and clear in all your social media communications so that there is no ambiguity or room for misinterpretation

Following these guidelines will help to increase your online presence, improve your SEO and boost your business reputation.  If you are ready to take your social media activity to a whole new level, Thales Training & Consultancy has launched two new social media training courses to help you get the most out of this amazing marketing tool.

Social Media Core Skills

Social Media Strategy - Developing an Effective Strategy to Grow your Brand and Business

Building an Effective LinkedIn Brand - Online Course

Effective Blogging for Business - Online Course

Using Twitter to Build your Brand and Business - Online Course