When you first start using social media to reach out to your audience, usually one particular social network stands out as being right for your business. For some businesses, Facebook seems like a natural choice; for others, it may be Twitter or Pinterest or another social media site.
Now that we're heading into the third week of the government shutdown, businesses across the country are affected to varying degrees. Obviously those business owners with direct governmental ties, for example those with government contracts, are affected the most, but the longer the shutdown continues, the further down the effects trickle.
All businesses with an online presence are trying to achieve the same basic goal - getting the largest possible captive audience so that the highest possible percentage of that audience will become (and remain) customers. Search engine optimization is one of the key ways to achieve this, because search engines are generally the first stop for people who are looking to purchase something or solve a problem. As such, the quest to rank high for particular search terms has become both an art and a science, with new techniques for optimization continually surfacing.
Facebook and Twitter are always there. You can pop in and check your accounts, disappear for a couple of weeks, and when you come back, everything is just how you left it, people carrying on the global conversation without you. What you're not seeing, however, is what your silence is costing you in followers and potential customers. Here are some reasons why it's important to stay consistently active on your social media accounts.
Most business owners know that they should have a blog on their website, but often once the blog is in place, there's some hesitation or confusion about how best to use it. Filling your blog with content isn't something to be done randomly - you'll want to adopt a strategy to make sure that you attract readers and, more importantly, retain them as customers.
The concept of a social media crisis is nothing new. Tales of people saying regretful things on the internet are nearly as old as the internet itself. The snag with online foot-in-mouth syndrome, however, is that unlike in real life, the things you say online continue to live on forever. Even if you delete the text in question, if someone has already drawn attention to it and reposted it, that text can still be spread around and read by countless numbers of people, long after you unsuccessfully tried to take back what you said.