Is your social media really under control?

By: Ryan Harrell, Creative Director
As a social media firm we get a lot of inquires as to how we can help a business market itself using social media. The whole process usually goes like this: A business comes to us asking for a quote and wondering what we can do. Our leadership team outlines a plan to get their customers engaged and figure out how many hours we will devote to this each month and develop a budget. Once they see the quote they either move forward or remember they have a receptionist or a nephew that has a Facebook account and figure how hard can it be. They then turn over control of their business image on all social networks to this person.

Now in some cases the #’s increase
I once talked to a client who said he has a person from his office doing his social networking and his #’s were going up. (Meaning that he was gaining new friends and followers on each of the networks.) I thought great, keep them engaged and you should be able to gain new customers. However upon looking at his profiles I quickly realized this probably would not happen. His business was localized. Meaning you could not really utilized his business unless you were local. However most of the likes and follows came from people not in the local area. It seems an online ad campaign had been ran incorrectly and he got a ton of likes, however not from anyone who would ever be able use his business. Even worse these were dead likes, or people who did not interact at all.

It is about the Apps.
Another situation I ran into was a friend who had a guy run a contest for him on his Facebook page. He did a giveaway and had tons of interaction. It would have been a successful once. However in the middle of the contest his page dissipated. It was no where to be found, gone for good. Where could it have gone? He was in the middle of a very expensive media buy and had tons of ads going out talking about the contest. How could this happen? It turns out the person running the contest did not use an app that followed Facebooks TOS. You see Facebook has guidelines for the way you can run giveaways and contests from the site. You have to use an app to run a contest, it has to be moderated and it has to follow the terms of service for Facebook or you could risk loosing your page, all the likes and data you have built up. There is no fine to pay to get it back either. It is gone for good. Now that is a tough price to pay.

Help I cannot get into my Facebook page!
I got a call one time that a friend of a friend could not login to the page they created. They had just secured the URL they wanted and was beginning to feel good about connecting socially with current and potential clients. So to take it to the next level they hired a social media expert to do some work on the page. They were happy with the work and got busy with the business and life and decided that they would let the social media expert do their job. A month into it the “expert” changed the rates, and demanded that the amount be paid immediately. It turns out since they were an admin on the Facebook page they were able to remove the original page owner and hold the page “ransom.” In order to get the page access back they would have to spend a money over and above the monthly fee, something that was for sure not in his budget. He decided he would create a new page instead of paying and something else happened. Since this guy was not in his local area he sold access to the page, URL and all the likes to a competing business in another area of the country. If you do not think this happens you can check eBay, there are new seasoned fan pages coming up each day on there.

The only way to be safe is to use us.. (Just Kidding) You have to be safe when dealing with social media experts, or companies you have not heard of. It is way to easy to deem yourself an expert, or call yourself a company and have bad intentions. This happens anytime there is a new area like social media that is changing the way we do business. One thing is for sure we have a lot of clients, extremely happy with the results, and you can be too.

Call us today and learn how we can help your manage your business’s social media.