Here’s a pretty interesting guest post over at Soshable which aims to remind us that, contrary to received wisdom, social media isn’t always a good idea for business. In other words, jumping onto Facebook, Twitter or whatever else isn’t an absolute must – and indeed, if approached ineffectively, can actually harm your business by wasting your time, confusing your customers and so on.
The main point of the article isn’t really that for certain types of business social media is useless (which isn’t the case) but rather that, without a well planned and implemented social media strategy, a badly executed attempt to engage with such media is almost always going to do more harm than good – even if only in the sense that you waste your valuable time.
Ultimately the pattern is usually the same for badly conceived social media campaigns – they are initiated because of the Zeitgeist perception that all businesses should have one, end up being rather aimless and, after an initial spurt of activity, slowly trail off as the ideas and content for a sustained presence are found wanting.
The aforementioned blog post covers all of these standard pitfalls, as well as giving handy tips (such as using the FBML app to customize your Facebook page so that it stands out from the crowd a little bit more).
In the end though, all of the mistakes discussed result in the same end product – a social media campaign that is static, uninteresting, and therefore ineffective. In other words, a Facebook page that is run like a web 1.0 website might have been – rather than a fluid source of content with which users engage with on a regular basis – something absolutely crucial to the establishment of a relationship with your business (and the whole point of social media campaigns in the first place).
