With the uproar in social media marketing and the presence of businesses on social media, there have been terrific records of small businesses growing swiftly. The power of social media on businesses cannot be overemphasized, but just as there is a negative side to everything in existence, social media activities can mar your business even more significantly than it could help you grow it.

You may be wondering how social media activities can mess your business up and even go as far as crashing it to the ground. Here are a few ways that social media could be a tool that catalyzes business death.

Poor Reputation Management

As wide as social media could be and as helpful as it can be to your business growth, there are chances that unpleasant things are going to be said about your business in numerous ways. These ways may include negative feedback, fake news, false information, fraudulent activities by hackers and smart reapers; to name a few.

How you react, respond, and manage these incidents that threaten your reputation on social media has a huge role to play in keeping your business afloat. There are situations where you have to manage and respond to negative feedback on social media immediately to prevent such information from escalating while at other times, there is a need to stay calm and avoid overreacting to avoid fanning the fire that will set your business ablaze. Whichever the case may be, finding the right reaction at the right time is very vital.

To help track feedback on social platforms and manage reputation, the need to use social monitoring tools to track every mention of your brand is paramount. An example is the social media sentiment analysis, among others.

Employees’ Social Activities

As much as the business is an entity on its own, people are working with the company and serve as representatives to the business in the outside world and on social media. The activities of these employees; their posts and contributions on social media can affect your business in so many ways. Although this does not require you to stalk your employee’s handle or monitor their social media activities, it is essential to enlighten them on how their posts, reactions, and other activities on social media can affect the business reputation.

For instance, when a business is in dire situations or facing some of its seemingly unending challenges, the employees may be targets for criticism and finger-pointing. Many employees without proper orientation may snap to give unpleasant reactions. In this case, businesses should enlighten their employee on how to react to social media criticism. Better still ignore the critiques.

Internet Fraudulence and Identity Cloning

We’ve all heard about identity cloning on social media. Some smart rippers go as far as cloning your social media identity to connect with your customers. This way, the customers that want to connect with your brand may get into their claws. When these customers are ripped off, your reputation is ripped from you as well. These customers can go as far as putting up negative feedback on social media all for some actions you did not take. Or should we say an act that was done on your behalf? That’s perhaps a better way to put it.

In situations like this, it’s important to keep your customers informed of the status and lead them right on how to get to the right social media handle. Most ideally, it is best to have a verified batch attached to your social media handle. That way, your customers will be confident that they are communicating with the right representatives of the business.

Hackers and Fake News

You may have built a reputation for communicating real news to your audience and customers for as long as three decades. This reputation can be brought to the ground by a hacker with access to your business login details. With one post of false/fake news, that reputation goes down crashing.  It is advised that the business employees keep the social media logins sacred and different device for the company’s social media activities instead of accessing personal social media and business media with the same device.

The reason for this is because hackers get quick access to those logins by bugging your devices (mostly personal device. How they bug the device with malware and spyware are not new or difficult to understand, but once the deed is done, you can keep the rest of the story to yourself. A typical scenario is an employee that made it clear her love for cats on social media being sent infected messages or ad pop-ups about cat accessories. On clicking these links, the computer is bugged and spied on. Logins are at the hacker’s disposal and should the business login be found on the device, the fate of the business’ reputation rests entirely on the hands of the hacker for as long as the passwords are unchanged.

Wrongly managing your social media can cause a lot of harm to your business and the reputation held by your business to the general public depends on its employees and its social media activities, especially in this social era. As you try managing the social activities of your employee, you have to be careful not to infringe on their rights. Thus, the best way to handle the security of your passwords and posts is to enlighten the employees and advice that they access the company’s social media handle with a separate device from their personal social activities.

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