Well-used social media can serve as a powerful tool. It allows the manager to gain insight into the competition, market, buyers and their needs, trends, and discover opportunities to gain new markets.
Well-used social media can also provide visibility into new services and the development of new and improved products.
Other benefits of social media include:
- Providing answers about your products and services to potential customers
- Make progress with the prospects you want by getting presentations and virtually connecting
- Business presentation and branding
Highlight great reviews from existing customers
While social media offers many benefits to organizations like anything else, it does have a dark side. Trolls, troublemakers, and pessimists engage in negative, potentially harmful behavior that can destroy morale and cause mental fatigue.
So how can companies take advantage of the benefits of social media while avoiding the pitfalls?
Follow a specific social media policy
Minimizing negative repercussions, or better yet preventing them, starts with a clearly defined social media policy. The best policies are detailed for trolls, bullying, profanity, negative behavior, harassment, and terms of service violations. . Establishing a social media policy is only the first step. It has to be enforced or it won’t do much good.
Empower social media managers and moderators
Persons employed to oversee an organization’s social media platforms must have the authority to enforce the provisions of the social media policy. Ignoring bad behavior will not make it go away. It can lead your business to hot water.
It is imperative to follow the provisions of the policy. Responses broken down into stages: such as hiding the comment first and then blocking the user if they try to engage in malicious behavior a second time are great ways to alert users and take appropriate action.
Why? Not all types of behavior require an immediate user ban. That said, it’s imperative to keep an eye on one-off violations. Moderators should take a screenshot of all interactions with these users to make sure the company has a record of everything that happened. The policy should clearly state what constitutes a warning and how many warnings deserve to be banned.
Put wellness first
Employers must take care of the well-being of social media moderators and managers. These individuals are at the forefront of the emotional war that sometimes takes place on social media platforms.
For this reason, organizations need to pay close attention to red flags such as the frequent summoning of sick people, delaying project completion, dismal behavior, and general deterioration in morale. If employers spot any of these red flags, they must take immediate action to remedy the problem. Moreover, they should take precautions to prevent this from happening in the first place.
Great ways to ease the pressure on moderators and social media managers include:
- Give them breaks from the time they spend on the platforms
- Have them swap jobs for the day with a coworker who has a different role
- Give them access to affordable advice
- Create and keep fun on social media with contests, memes, GIFs, jokes, and general fun
The many benefits of social media far outweigh the disadvantages. When companies take proactive steps to protect their employees from the potential harm that bad social media actors can do, they will maximize the benefits while avoiding the disadvantages.
