This Week’s Social Media Top Stories
10 Creative Ways to Use Instagram for Business
Social Media Examiner gives us a look at ways to use Instagram to connect with your community. Many of the ways they mention have to do with making your brand more open and giving a sneak peak at the everyday functions that aren’t normally see. Showing off your employees or showing how products are made make your brand more personal to the audience. Most of their creative ways of using Instagram have to do with having fun with your brand.
Followers of brands can get bored if you are only promoting your brand the old fashion way. But spicing things up by having fun can keep your community interested and coming back for more. With Instagram grabbing more and more daily users every day, marketers and brand managers need these creative ways to grab part of this growing community. I like that fact that many companies are now being personal by showing workers, or their office, it makes me feel like I am part of their brand and not just a follower stalking them for updates.
Facebook Launches Test of Promoted Posts for U.S. Users with Fewer Than 5k Friends/Subscribers
This article by AllFacebook.com talks about the new promoted posts feature that Facebook has just launched this week. The whole idea of this is to allow users to improve upon there news feed rankings. This feature which costs $7 if you really want to use is can be beneficial but seems like not to many people would want to use it. The idea behind this is great, if you have an important message to your friends that may never get seen, spend the money and your post will now be seen by everyone.
The problem with this is what average user will want to spend $7 just to have a post noticed by all of their friends. Most of user’s friends are people that they rarely speak to anyway. The average user has about 300 friends but realistically don’t speak to most of them on a daily basis. If you decide to use this feature, Facebook gives you statistics about the post letting you know how many people have viewed this. I don’t think this is something I will use personally, will you?
How KitchenAid Minimized Its Twitter Damage
Todd Wasserman from Mashable writes about the damage that KitchenAid’s political tweet caused and how they bounced back so quickly. By now most of us in the social media world heard about the offensive Tweet that a member of KitchenAid sent out during the political debate about President Obamas grandmother. After the tweet went out and was noticed by upper management a brand apology brought the chaos down within hours.
Many businesses and brands should learn from this mistake that happened to KitchenAid. While it is hard to prevent personal opinions to be set aside, companies need to set up some social media guidelines to try to prevent issues like this from happening. It isn’t easy for companies to prevent this since many users will have access to the company’s networks, and can post at any time. But having a plan of action in case of a situation like KitchenAid can help the company turn a sour condition back to norm. Having upper management monitor Tweets or Posts is a great way that the company can make sure the team and message stay focused. Does your company have a response plan for circumstances like this? Will you now?