How to use social media to promote your brand without risking your company’s reputation
It’s important for businesses to stay engaged on their social media accounts so they can respond quickly to negative feedback and keep customers happy.
Here are the rules for engaging on social media as a CEO.
1. Monitor social media using listening rooms
CEOs must proactively invest, monitor and participate in the conversations that bubble up online in a meaningful way. One common way to do that is by setting up social media listening rooms and forums. For instance, larger companies like Coca-Cola maintain social media “war rooms” where they acknowledge complaints, fix them and recognize the customer who brought it to their attention.
2. Decide on a social media identity
There’s a natural inclination to separate your business and personal accounts, but really, that just creates more work and takes away your credibility.
If you’re serious about being a CEO, then you need to be real about who you are on social media and what you tweet or post at all times. It doesn’t help business or progress if you’re switching between two social media accounts. Your public persona as a CEO should be authentic, which eliminates the need for separate business and personal accounts.
3. Consolidate all social media accounts onto one platform
Buy a platform that enables you to consolidate what’s happening in all social media accounts. Although we use LinkedIn for recruiting and Facebook is a great platform for us to share our internally produced news content, we aggregate all social media accounts under one hood, which is managed by our marketing department. This helps us learn from the various platforms and monitor all the accounts.
4. Proactively protect your reputation
Customers want to do business with socially responsible companies and viral bad press can be very damaging. Companies and even individuals who are slandered on the internet have little or no recourse unless it’s through identity theft insurance or reputational risk insurance.
Launched in 2010, reputation risk insurance reduces the risk of scandals and the spread of negative information about a brand in the news and on the web. While risk policies are costly, they cover major expenses associated with a scandal, including advertising, consultations with specialists and public relations advisers.
5. Create a thoughtful social media plan and follow it
There are so many social media channels, and they all serve a different purpose. That’s why we use a social media plan to strategically determine which channels to use to either project an image, sell, participate, communicate, advertise, self-promote, recruit or simply provide value. Some of our posts are related to social justice and making the world a better place, but we also use social media as a mechanism for recruitment and selling. These are the implicit purposes of a business, and social media is a channel to achieve your company’s purpose.
