Everyone wants you to be social. If you're a marketer, you have heard about a million times in recent weeks, months and years about the power and necessity of social media. Get a blog, get on Twitter, create a fan page, etc. Every piece of advice seems to point toward being more social, open and transparent.
Engaging with social media is important for the tourism industry, though the way you do it can and should vary depending on your business and goals. Marketers want to avoid the landmines—the situations or instances in social media that may be likely to blow up in their faces. Those are often the situations where being antisocial is the best strategy.
Here are a few situations on how to be antisocial online and help your brand succeed at the same time:
Never allow YouTube comments. Allowing people to comment on your YouTube videos without moderating can be a big mistake because the vast majority of YouTube comments lack substance, include uninformed or somehow offensive remarks and offer little context or real discussion. If you want to foster dialogue on your videos, create a video blog and embed the video into the blog, then allow people to comment on the video in the blog. This will generally result in higher-quality comments.
Don’t friend/follow everyone. As a brand, the temptation is to friend and follow everyone who contacts you or requests to be your friend. Resist that temptation, and make it the job of someone on your team to actively monitor these requests and approve them based on criteria that you set. These criteria can range from lax to more specific to your area of concentration. The effort will pay off, though, when it comes to using a particular social network as a marketing platform and tool for collaboration, because you will be talking only to people who really matter.
Moderate your profiles actively. What is written online is not written in stone, and as a brand you have the right to set the ground rules for your own profiles and sites online. What this requires is clearly posting your policy about what is not okay for people to post and share in your environments. This doesn't mean you should delete anything negative or critical, but off-topic or offensive comments or posts can and should be moderated. When people post incorrect or flawed information, you have a right and obligation to correct them (but allow their comment to be posted if it meets your criteria).
Separate private content. There are legitimate reasons why you might want to share brand content among a small subset of users or internal users online. Just because content is online doesn't mean that everything needs to be open and public. If you feel you have a legitimate reason for sharing password-protected private content, you should do so. If it is extremely sensitive, make sure you take the right steps to protect it and prevent it from getting into the wrong hands.
Promote yourself and your brand. Part of the benefit of using social media is that it allows you an authentic place to share branded offers or promote your products and services. Unfortunately, some brands are advised that just because they are on social media they should never consider using it for marketing reasons. If you are using social media in an authentic and not overly promotional way on a daily basis, you can earn the right to share marketing information at various points and not lose your audience. The real trick is to strike the right balance.
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