What are the Pitfalls of Using Social Media

Even though many busi­nesses nowa­days are rais­ing about social media, but to be hon­est, it is not so easy to use and it is not for every sin­gle busi­ness. Such busi­ness like highly reg­u­lated finance or health care indus­try, to use social media to mar­ket their prod­ucts and ser­vices, they really need to have some clear poli­cies and guide­lines, their legal team has to get pre­pared for in case if there any worse sce­nario hap­pen, inte­grat­ing social media for com­pli­ance rea­sons is chal­lenge, example.

It is also the fact that some busi­nesses have an eas­ier time in imple­ment­ing the social media as opposed to others.

I would say social media can bring lots of ben­e­fits to your busi­ness, but there are also some dan­gers and pit­falls, which you should keep in mind. As long as you’re aware of them, you can work to avoid these pit­falls and use them to your advantage.

Once you start, you can’t stop

Social media web­site is a com­mu­nity and social net­work­ing based plat­form, your friends, col­leagues, cus­tomers, or vip mem­bers may are already using it to net­work and share infor­ma­tion with oth­ers, so they wish, hop­ing or expect­ing you to be there as well, because the peer pres­sure, you even­tu­ally get on and start to share yours piece of cake and dis­cuss the top­ics and sub­jects with them. You are excited and ener­gized because you had some good suc­cess at the beginning.

After time being, you find by par­tic­i­pat­ing the activ­i­ties, it demands huge amount of your time to stay active, then you start to slow down, you lost the moti­va­tion, stop shar­ing and engag­ing with your mem­bers and friends. Because of your behav­ior changes, it will cause your friends and your mem­bers feel like you’re neglect­ing them, and you know what — if they con­tin­ued using social media to grow their net­work, they can find infor­ma­tion from other resources (maybe from your com­peti­tors), there are plenty of them in the social media net­work platform.

Thus, if you don’t want to lose your audi­ences, you need to keep up, keep your orga­ni­za­tion in the con­ver­sa­tion and con­tinue to lis­ten, learn, adapt and share. It does take some com­mit­ment, but later on, you and your mem­bers will find it reward­ing, it is worth thing to do. So don’t stop!

Receive neg­a­tive comments

Fac­ing crit­i­cism in some way, some shape or some type of form is a nor­mal thing for every busi­nesses. In the “good old days”, you could send out your mass faxes, your printed newslet­ters, your blast emails to oth­ers and with­out wor­ry­ing about any com­plaints. If some­one dis­agreed with what you were say­ing or doing, with­out spend­ing lots of money, they couldn’t really tell many peo­ple about it.

You giv­ing up some of that con­trol with using social media. Due to the nature open struc­ture of social media, any­one and every­one on Twit­ter, Face­book or Blogs can “gang up” on you. If you afraid of neg­a­tive com­ments, just this point alone, it can keep many orga­ni­za­tions away from jump­ing into social media, but it actu­ally shouldn’t be like that.

If you are con­cern­ing about your busi­ness might receive neg­a­tive com­ments from social media. You should stop your wor­ries because those crit­i­cize can really pro­vides you the oppor­tu­ni­ties to turn that neg­a­tiv­ity into some­thing pos­i­tive. If you are really seri­ous about to read or see those neg­a­tive com­ments, you should think about in the long term when you post online. For instance, you may want to think about your brand and what you want it to be known for, doing your own research and be care­ful before any reacting.

No com­mu­ni­ca­tion is disposable

No mat­ter what nor when you post some­thing, either tweets, com­ments, sta­tuses or blog post, some­time the speed and sheer amount of com­mu­ni­ca­tions’ prob­lem may cause you think it go unno­ticed, but the fact is some­one out there will see it. And, in many cases even if you deleted a post, but it has already been indexed, saved or copied somewhere.

Thus be care­ful of what you post, if you wouldn’t say it in front of a group of 5 or 10 mem­bers, then don’t say it on your blog, twit­ter or any other social media. It’s hap­pened so many times — pub­li­cized and not — that one would think we could learn from oth­ers’ mistakes.

As an exam­ple of in March 2009, the MSNBC arti­cle cites Dan Leone, a Philadel­phia Eagles sta­dium employee, who was fired after slam­ming the foot­ball orga­ni­za­tion for trad­ing a player in his Face­book sta­tus update.

Well, no mat­ter how dan­ger social media might be, don’t let above these pit­falls and ideas scare you. You do need to use social media to pro­mote your organization’s brand, posi­tions, ben­e­fits, mem­ber, events and more.

Social media is essen­tial for any busi­ness. It can bring issues to light a prob­lems the busi­ness might not have knew it existed. It is a way to help you con­nect with cus­tomers in a deeper level that might even­tu­ally become loyal customers.

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