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.

Microblogging as the term suggests means blogging in micro pieces. It permits you to write brief texts on a particular social community or on a site and publish to be viewed by anyone. The basic aim of microblogging is to communicate and converse with the certain limit of characters. Microblogging is gaining popularity as it requires least effort from the people to be connected to each other.

The various Microblogging networks available are:

• Twitter
• Moodmill
• Facebook
• Bebo

Out of all the Microblog services Twitter has been the most popular among all and the reason of its popularity is it has constantly allowed people to communicate with the world applications and also connecting with the interesting people.There is an advantage to the twitter post, here you can pen your thoughts instantly and not like other blogs where you have to do time management and have to gather the thoughts before writing them. Moreover twitter is being used widely by people all over the globe so the information one can get from twitter is magnificent.

Microblogging plays a significant role in promoting one’s business. On Twitter you can set up your account to promote your business online and as twitter is visited by thousands of people daily and would route lot of traffic to your site. But this is not enough as creating an account or by doing link building. As people would not be interested in your site but you have to arouse the interest of the people and you can do this by finding people with whom your interests match so then you can spread the message promptly as twitter is all about quick response.

There are some steps about how to post when you are doing it for the first time:

• Try to publish interesting blogs/articles
• What is your view point on current events
• Another way of making friends on twitter is to give a reply to another user on his /her blog and you can increase your contacts manifold.
• Another simpler way is to repeat someone’s else blog and again you can check who have repeated your blog so that you can generate traffic to your website.

The crux of the whole discussion lies in the fact microblogging helps the customers to publicize the brands online as you believe that it would be of great use for the people and this is fine but as soon people indulge in spamming then it losses its value and shine.

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