How Social Media Can Hurt Your Business and What To Do About It

There's a saying that "Ignorance is Bliss", but when it comes to social media, ignorance can be detrimental to your business. There are still many business owners and executives out there who don’t understand that social media can impact their business in a negative way, especially if customers have a less than desirable experience with that company. According to this survey, twice as many people tell others about bad service than good.

In this day and age of fast communication, a person who has a bad service experience can easily go on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and tell all of their fans and followers about it. Forget about writing a letter to the CEO to complain. People can now write up a detailed blog post and share that experience with the world. That message can spread like wild fire such as the case when United Airlines broke a customer’s guitar and the customer decided to post a YouTube video to let people know. That video now has over 11 million page views and has turned into a great case study of how social media can make an impact on how people perceive a company.

This brings to light the importance of monitoring the various social media channels to find out what is being said about your business. It allows you to respond in a timely manner and be able to address customer problems with your business in a proactive way. For example, if a customer decided to write a blog post about how awful your product or service is, you could leave a comment or email that customer to see what you can do to fix the situation so that the “wildfire” doesn’t spread.

Monitoring what is being said about your company is an easy thing to do, but there are still many companies that don’t do it.  One way to keep track is to do a simple web search or a Google blog search for your company name, or check Twitter search for mentions. Another site to continuously monitor is Yelp, a place where people can search for businesses and post reviews.

If you want to put blog search mentions on auto-pilot, all you have to do is choose from one of the options available at the bottom of the Google blog search page. You can create an email alert or add a search feed to Google Reader:

You may also want to check out these 20 free social media monitoring tools via SocialBrite.org.

Do you currently keep track of what customers are saying about you on social media? If so, what tools to you use?