Since social Media provide great scopes for communicating and interacting, smalls and medium businesses (SMBs) find them very useful as they could reach and interact with maximum people at a time and get bigger chances of converting prospects into customers and clients. Social Media truly help SMBs to grow but they are not at all risk-free. Mishandling of the social media could turn into potential threats for SMBs and hence it is essential for SMB owners to know the negative sides of the social media before making use of them. Before connecting your business or brand with the society through a social media you should know about a few things that you must avoid. These are:

Hiring inexperienced social media managers: Don’t hire people to manage your social media on the basis of their communication skills and intelligence. Select people who have the experience of representing and managing business brands and communities since there is a big difference between interacting with people on current affairs and on a particular brand of products or services. Assign the task to people who are very close you brand by brain and heart to ensure they keep working for making image of the brand brighter on social media.

Inability to realize where to cut off conversations: When SMBs manage communities, people often get scopes to make comments that could hurt the reputation and image of their brands. Interacting with people doesn’t mean allowing somebody to say just anything. So it is very essential for a community manager to know where to cut off a conversation. For example, if somebody makes baseless complains about your brand there is no point in continuing with the chat. Your community manager should have the ability to judge where to cut off a negative conversation and disallow the person’s access to your community.

Out of control conversations: Often conversations between community managers of SMBs and people turn from public to private and that’s when the managers lose control of the brands. But an out of control conversation could have a big adverse impact on a brand. So, you as an SMB owner must know how to manage reputation of your management and to do that you should listen to what people are saying about your brand. Don’t depend completely on your community manager and have direct conversations with people to know their reactions and respond accordingly. This is something that you cannot expect from a community manager as he/she is not as caring about your brand as you are.

Wrong understanding of a vernacular: To figure out what exactly an individual or a group of people are saying about your brand or business, you must understand their vernacular properly. So your social media manager has to be an expert in that vernacular. So before joining in a conversation make sure you clearly understand each noun, verb and adjective used by people on the other side. This will help you in understanding their views properly.

When we think of a penguin, what comes to mind is the intelligent Arctic bird which is loved worldwide after having been featured in numerous commercials and other mediums. However, Google has launched its own search algorithm named after this popular bird and it contains an exclusive Downfall meme as well. 24th April saw the release of this update which is specifically targeted at inefficient websites. It promises to deal with problem factors backing such inefficiency such as unwanted links and spamming.

Some content on the web can be deemed poor on account of keyword stuffing. Other reasons can be the total mismatch of site content and the links available. There are relevant examples provided by Google with regard to the concept of keyword stuffing and link schemes through their official blog. Penguin cleans up all such poor content on the web and with Google being spot-on when it comes to information, the consumer is king!

According to Google, this concept which has been deemed a novel one is poised to influence approximately 3.1 percent of all English linguistic queries. Queries for languages most affected by spamming are dealt with most effectively in this case. Penguin may well be constitute a meager share in regards to its overall effect yet numerous online reports have been brought to light with serious effects due to visible changes in the SERP’s and this augurs well for it.

As users you would naturally think of the best course of action in case you are affected in a similar manner due to such ongoing problems. If white hat SEC tactics have been adopted by your site for the purpose of building up all your links naturally, then there should be no negative effect on the same. What Google Penguin can do in such cases is improve the SERP’s considerably and maintain the best standards of quality for your website.

In the event of any problems on account of this update you can feel free to fill up the feedback form provided for such cases. Making complaints is also easy if you feel you have been losing SERP’s unnecessarily. Google will do its best to fix your problem as early as possible.

Google tightens the reins only if your website has been indulging in spamming. No reconsideration requests will be accepted in that case. The solution is to remove all spam content from your website and consider the usage of white hat tactics instead. What remains to wonder about is in the name of the update, which many feel has been drawn from the story of the penguins at Edinburgh zoo envying the pandas for the attention they receive all the while.