Social media can have a profound effect on your company's brand image and bottom line.
Whether that effect is positive or negative depends largely on how your social media presence is handled, and how it's perceived by consumers.
J.D. Power and Associates Report
In February 2013, J.D. Power and Associates released a report that found a link between social media and consumers' likelihood to buy from a company.
The 2013 Social Media Benchmark Study was based on a survey of more than 23,000 U.S. online consumers who had interacted with companies' social media channels. More than 100 companies were studied, from the airline, auto, banking, credit card, telecom, and utility industries.
One major finding was that companies who are focused on pushing their marketing and brand messages, while ignoring customers' attempts to connect, are likely to end up with dissatisfied customers. And those customers are likely to go elsewhere for their products or services.
The same study found a connection between the satisfaction customers felt toward a company's social marketing and communication efforts and the likelihood of those customers making a purchase from that company.
Of the customers who were highly satisfied, 87% said that their social interaction with the company had positively influenced their likelihood to buy.
What does this mean for your company's social media marketing?
For one thing, you need to respond to customer comments and complaints. Ignoring them -- whether their comments are positive or negative -- can only hurt your efforts in the end.
Social Media Best Practices
So, how can you ensure that your customers are satisfied with your social media efforts, and that you're not pushing them away?
Here are a few tips:
* As mentioned above, make sure you're responding to customer comments on your social media channels. It's impossible to reply to every comment if you have a lot of followers, but making an effort to handle customer complaints is essential;
* By the same token, do not give in to the temptation to delete negative comments from your social media profiles. If you gain a reputation for deleting user comments, you're likely to end up in a worse situation than if you'd addressed the comments openly;
* Treat negative comments as feedback to help you improve. It's easy to take criticism personally, but by viewing it as a way to strengthen the weak areas of your company, you can better respond with grace and tact;
* Customers will remember how you respond to negative press. If you or one of your employees has a very visible meltdown on social media, it can be hard to bounce back. You can't take back what you say once it's online, so take the time to formulate a well-thought response to negative feedback.
Negative social media can hurt your sales.
To avoid future problems, put a plan in place now for how you'll handle negative comments and criticism, and how you'll use them to improve your company.