Social media can be a delicate thing and knowing your way around it is always helpful… We want to help guide you through this minefield to ensure that you aren’t jeopardising your brand or reputation.
One of the first things we would like to look at is making sure that your company profiles are kept in line with your professional views.
Having a personal touch is great because it can act as a voice to your audience, but if not kept in check, could have a devastating impact on the business further down the line.
Some bad examples…
Jack Maynard
For those of you that may have watched I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here in 2017, then you will have probably heard about the events surrounding Jack Maynard. A series of offensive tweets from his past had resurfaced and were shared/talked about all over social media and were headline news.
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Subsequently, Jack Maynard was forced to leave the show. This left his professional reputation and credibility as a YouTube blogger in tatters.
A lot of his fans may have lost respect or confidence in Maynard as a person and potentially stop watching his videos. As well, for a long time, organisations and businesses were likely not to want to work with him or ask him to promote their products because of his past posts.
James Gunn
Hollywood director of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Suicide Squad’, James Gunn found himself in a similar situation after old ‘questionable’ tweets that Gunn had made in his youth, resurfaced online.
After the leak, James Gunn was then axed from Disney. They stated: “The statements on James’ Twitter feed were inconsistent with our studio’s values” and therefore he had to be removed from Disney and Marvel’s roster of directors.
Gunn and Disney have since made up and decided to work together to complete new projects but in situations like this, there isn’t always a happy ending.
Similarly, the tweets and posts you put out via your business account represent you as a company so make sure its a safe subject before you go jumping in head first! As seen above, tweets and posts from years ago can come back to haunt you!
Three key points on protecting your company’s reputation:
There is a lot of room for mistakes on social media but don’t worry, we have put together these three key pointers to help guide you through and help keep your brand on the straight and narrow!
1) Tone of voice
Be careful of the language you use on your social media accounts.
As seen above in our examples, once you post something on your account it is instantly made available to anyone on the internet and its a vast place, to say the least!
Being informal is absolutely fine if that’s the tone of voice that you’re aiming for, but just make sure you don’t use any offensive language, or abbreviating words to the point that they become illegible or unacceptable.
Using a certain tone of voice can also help your customers/readers recognise you when scrolling down their newsfeed!
2) Images
Images and other types of visual content such as gifs and videos are becoming a prime staple of social media these days.
When it comes to images and videos it’s important to be original with the content you’re creating or using, this can help you stand out from the crowd and help with engagement but also prevents you from crossing any copyright infringement.
With copyright infringement, the company that owns the assets has the power to ask you to remove the content you’ve used.
3) Transparency
Another great way of protecting your businesses’ reputation is by staying true to your word.
There’s no point exaggerating the truth, lying about what you can do or advertising something that you can’t deliver because it will negatively reflect in your reviews, whether that be on Facebook or Google, that you are not a trustworthy organisation.
It’s good, to be honest with your audience, this can actually help your reputation in a way that your customers know that you’re a real business with real people. We find that this helps customers respect and appreciate your business more.
If you feel that you need some help maintaining your brand reputation online or want a hand building up your social media presence then give us a call on 01925 563 960 or take a look at some of the social media management projects we’ve worked on in the past here.
