Have your inexperienced employees been making some major mistakes while interacting with others on the social media accounts used for promoting your business? Have you been considering drastic measures like closing down the accounts and creating new ones for carrying on social media marketing for your company? Well, guess what – that route is closed! Even if you manage to build another account, the people already on the last account will think twice, or even thrice, before accepting your requests to have them join your new network. In fact, in the worst case, the brand name of your business may also be viewed with suspicion, since this kind of action is usually taken by spammers.

So, no, creating new accounts on social media networks and scrapping the old ones are definitely out of the picture. What you can do, however, is try to mend the reputation of your brand on the networks. Here are some tips that should help with that:

1. Have your social media marketers post apology messages on the networks, where any kind of rude comments may have been published. This will not set things right with every offended user, but will at least prove that your company is ready to accept blame for mistakes and work towards improving its standing.

2. If customers have been posting comments criticizing your products/ services on the networks, and your team has been ignoring those, now is the time to fix the situation. Be sure that every such comment is followed up, and the issues resolved in a constructive manner. However, if your team has been deleting those comments, then there might not be much you can do now, except paying attention to any new comments of that kind. In that case, you are likely to lose trust of a lot of people, but hopefully, you should be able to gain the trust of some new ones.

3. Lastly, make sure that the employees assigned with the task of carrying out social media activities for your company are knowledgeable enough about social media to get the job done properly. If you believe that some of them might not be adequately experienced, then it is certainly a good idea to send them to a social media marketing workshop of some kind, before they resume their tasks.

Mending the reputation of your company on social media networks can be pretty difficult when a lot of things have already gone wrong. However, with proper knowledge and corrective action, you should be able to get your SMM campaign back on track.

Have you been conducting both search engine optimization and social media marketing for your business website for quite some time? Well, hopefully, you have ensured that your actions for both those marketing processes complement one another. When combined, SEO and SMM can form an immensely powerful combination, while both are about half as effective when carried out separately.

However, before you can combine SEO with SMM, you need to locate the common tools that benefit both the techniques. You may already be using the most important tool of that kind though. Guess what – it’s your company blog!

The most significant benefit of having a blog is the versatility it brings to promotional campaigns that you carry out. Whether you need to get more followers in social media channels, or want to milk search engines for more traffic, nothing beats having a regularly updated blog. All you need to do is to make sure that the blog is well-written, and that the topics of the posts are related to your business. Also, try to have a little humor mixed with dry facts in the blog posts. It should make the text a little more palatable to visitors.

Always post links to new blog posts on social media channels. That way, you will not only get good traffic to your blog, but your social media channels are also likely to gain new followers.

So, don’t wait any longer. Start combining these two marketing tools today, and extract maximum traffic for your business website, in a hassle free manner.

Companies that have recently launched their social media marketing campaigns often find that they are unable to convert visitors to their social media channels. Are you the owner of one such company? Are you noticing  hundreds of “likes” on your company’s Facebook page and thousands of followers on Twitter channel, but very few (if any) conversions? Well, then you might not be “engaging” your followers in the proper manner. Yes, that’s right! Having thousands of followers without interacting properly with them is not much different from having no followers at all. Let’s see how this situation can be avoided on various networks, shall we?

1. Face it… you’re on Facebook: And that means you need to engage people who “like” your FB page. Find out their IDs, and befriend them if possible. Periodically, ask them for feedback on products (or services) that you have recently launched. Ask them to suggest ways for improving those products (or services). Engaging followers in this manner helps establish the general perception that the company actually pays attention to what their consumers think about their products and services. What better way is there to impress prospective consumers?

2. Twitter is for tweeting, right?: Yes, and it is for engaging people as well! The next time you see someone retweeting one of your tweets about a product, how about sending him (or her) a direct message thanking the follower for the RT, and also asking about his (or her) opinion about the product? That could be a sure shot way of making more people interested in your company, and consequently, your products.

3. LinkedIn… It’s all about answering: No, it is not you, who will do the answering. Rather, you will ask your customers to express their opinions regarding your products and services. This can be especially useful if you are in B2B type of businesses, where a number of your biggest customers are likely to have active presence on this social media network already. Simply engage them via LinkedIn Answers, and as they answer your queries about the products and services that you have launched, the visibility of your posts will keep on increasing, attracting other members towards your posts as well.

Social media networks are not just tools for you to beat the drum about your brand. These are the best tools that can help you build credibility for your brand as well. The power is in your hands, to harness the proper potential of these networks. Use it well, and your sales are guaranteed to hit the roof shortly. And that’s no joke!