Social media is something that evokes excitement as well as fear, providing the possibility of unlimited reach as well as risks to your business.

The phenomenon is shaping the way we do our sales and marketing, changing the way companies across the globe do business. Using social media can:

• Connect your business with your clients
• Provide a valuable resource for drawing in potential employees
• Recruit the finest candidates for jobs
• Provide priceless public relations
• Provide a viral marketing tool

However, Facebook®, LinkedIn®, Twitter® and Google+®, can also prove hazardous to your business, depending on how you and your employees use it. Getting a message out to a large amount of people almost instantaneously comes with its pros and cons.

Social buzz

You don’t need to create a viral campaign to get noticed on social media. It’s all about putting your business on a platform to promote your brand and reputation.

That’s why it’s good to know who’s talking about you. Whether it’s a competitor, former or current employee or client, you need to make sure no one is tarnishing your company’s name or reputation on social media. Giving you just as much reason, if you haven’t already, to get an account than not. The same holds true for blogs, where damaging content may appear without your consent.

The best way to prevent internet buzz from becoming a hazard is to monitor the use of your company name. You can do this by typing it in to your search engine or the search function on any social media. It’s good to get your website top of the results list on your search engine and make sure nothing offensive comes up in the first 20 hits, which is statistically as far as most people will dig in a search.

If you do find references to your company name in the first 20 hits that could be hazardous to your business or your reputation, you have a few options:

• Check social networking sites – are these the culprits?
• Send a social media policy to your employees identifying what content they are allowed and not allowed to associate with your business e.g. differentiating between a business account and a personal account
• Is it coming from an external source or website? If so, considering how you can contact them to ask them to take it down or address and resolve their issue they are having with your business. This could result in something negative turning into something positive and winning back potentially negative PR.

The great thing about the online world is you can find what everyone else in the world is talking about. Whether positive or negative, you can then decide what you would like to do with that information to improve your businesses reputation and reconnect with what might have been a lost customer.

Source: Zywave- Balancing the Benefits and Risks of Social Networking

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