If you spend any of your free time on the internet, chances are you have a personal Facebook account, Twitter account, and maybe a few other accounts here and there. If you’re also using social media for marketing your business, then you probably have separate accounts set up under your company’s name, as well. Regardless of whether you’re a sole proprietor or have an office full of employees, someone has to be running your social media accounts, updating and responding to activity. That someone may be you, or it may be an associate.
One of the things you want to ensure in your business social media presence is consistency. Whereas with your personal accounts, it doesn’t matter so much if you slack off for a while or don’t update very often, not keeping your business accounts updated can be tremendously detrimental. You don’t want visitors to think that your business is collecting cobwebs, or that you’re not available on a regular basis. Having a schedule to remind yourself to update can help you appear responsive and attentive.
You also need to decide how much of your personality to inject into your business social media presence. You certainly don’t want your tweets and Facebook updates to seem robotic – nobody wants to read that. At the same time, people who are visiting your business pages probably don’t want to read an endless stream of updates about what you had on your burger at lunch or how much you hate sitting in traffic. While an update on your life here and there can help make your business seem more human, save the majority of personal information for your personal profiles.
Of course, you may also need to be careful about what you say on your personal accounts if your connection to your business is widely known or easily searchable. People do research companies on Google, and if it’s easily discovered that you are the proprietor of a certain business, potential customers may very well have a look at your personal Twitter or Facebook accounts before deciding whether to do business with you. There are ways to adjust your privacy settings on most social networks so that you can have some control over who sees what, and you don’t necessarily need to be paranoid about every word you say. Just make sure that when you make public updates on your personal accounts, you ask yourself how it would reflect on your business if a potential customer were to run across those updates.
