Why You Shouldn’t Turn Comments Off

Why You Shouldn’t Turn Comments Off

By Kylie Stanley, PR Technician

Social media is a valuable source for brands to hear feedback from customers, listen to concerns and engage with their followers. As a brand you might feel that turning off comments can help to prevent negativity, keep the focus on your product, save money from having to monitor comments and feel exclusive. But turning comments off on social media or ads is a bad business practice that should be avoided. In this blog, we will break down why you should keep your comments on.

Opens Conversations

Social media is a great place to listen to your customers and have open conversations about your brand and/or products. It also allows customers to engage with other customers about the products. We’ve seen comments before where one negative comment leads to multiple positive comments from other customers touting them on why they love the products. Allowing these open conversations lets your customers engage with each other or provide product concerns that need to be addressed.

If a customer has a negative experience with your product or service, wouldn’t you want to know about it? Or if they have a question about how to use it, wouldn’t you want to help them? Turning off comments would only lead to upset customers and never provide insights into any problems within your business.

Creative Ideas

By having open conversations on social media, it can develop ideas that your business can implement. If you see negative comments about a specific product, you could write a blog or press release on the item to debunk these comments and spread awareness on the item. Additionally, social media comments could lead to creative ideas of what you could do at a tradeshow, whether it be fun booth ideas, giveaways or a trades influencer who wants to meet up and learn more about your brand.

How to Handle Negative Feedback

Now that we have discussed why keeping the comments on is beneficial for your brand, let’s discuss how to handle any negative comments you might receive.

Make sure to reply to their comments! Most times, negative comments are coming from a bad experience, so ask “can you please email or message us with more detailing regarding your issue.” This will show other customers that you’re being attentive and taking note of any problems customers might have. Also, remember everything on the internet is public for everyone, so not responding or leaving an aggressive comment towards your customer would reflect badly on the company.

Another alternative to turning off comments that you shouldn’t do is deleting or hiding comments.  Hiding comments can weaken the trust between you and your followers and make you appear to be hiding something. Social media is meant to be conversational, so you should show your customers that you are receptive to both positive and negative feedback and want to encourage discussion. Check out our full blog post on “best practices for handling negative comments” to learn more.

Before you turn your comments off on social media or ads, think about the feedback you could be missing. Be open to having conversations with customers to see how you can improve any concerns that may need to be addressed.

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20+ Industrial Maintenance Training Resources

20+ Industrial Maintenance Training Resources

With the ongoing concern about our nation’s skills gap, the option for choosing an education to pursue a vocational career is certainly an attractive one. With plentiful skilled labor jobs to fill, trade jobs pay very well (sometimes better than four-year college degrees) and don’t saddle students with hefty student loans.

In an article from SJVC, a private career college, they discuss more than 20 resources for maintenance training. With a variety of resources, you can expand your knowledge about the industrial market and explore your career options.

General Resources and Publications

Sometimes the best place to learn more is by reading more about it. By reading publications that correspond with the industrial market, you can learn more about what’s happening in the industry and about tips and tricks.

Video Series

Watching videos is a great way to do online training and gives insights on the daily work a maintenance worker might be doing. You may also expand your knowledge by watching training videos that can allow you to get an overview of the job and the tools you would be using.

Podcasts

Podcasts offer crucial information from someone who works in the career firsthand. Putting on a podcast is a great way to hear day-in-the-life reporting and an easy way to listen to tips.

Social Media

Social media is a valuable place to get recommendations, learn industry news and see insight into the career you want to enter. Social media can also help you look at a specific company and show you what they do in a day.

Check out the article from SJVC to see further in depth about each of these training resources.

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Why Have Social Media Policies?

Why Have Social Media Policies?

By Kaylee Lauriel, PR Intern

The prominence of social media and the presence of a cellphone in everyone’s pockets means many things, two of which being that nothing is private, and your company needs a strong social media policy.

There are eight components to a firm social media policy:

Purpose

Your company needs to understand why the policy is being created to govern social media, and what it will means for your company’s social media going forward.

Definition

Clearly define what your company will classify as social media, the specific platforms, and how the company will use the platforms. Your HR department will also include a clearly defined cellphone use policy, as many companies prohibit the personal use of social media during company time.

Users

Establish who in the company will be authorized to contribute, engage with and respond to social media, and who will be monitoring their activities. Appoint a company photographer to oversee taking photos to post.

Ownership

Decide who is in charge of creating and selecting content with guidelines and schedules for posting. This person, or people, will handle any photo or video release forms.

Content

Plainly define the type of information that can and cannot be shared.

Employee Conduct

Create a code of conduct for employees to adhere to in order to prevent them from accidentally commenting about the company or a situation without the company’s knowledge, control and explicit consent.

Communication Risks

Establish guidelines, both general and specific, and best practices for the use of different social media platforms. Make sure to touch on copyright material, any trademarks, imagery guidelines and a list of topics that should never be posted.

Negative Comments Protocol

Make sure there is a well-defined protocol on how to handle a customer’s negative posts or comments, such as when to acknowledge them, when to delete them and how to handle potential threatening posts or comments. Marketing and human resources both must be involved and have a plan of action to minimize the impact of negative posts and comments. The more likes, shares, tags and attention the post gets, the more the narrative spins out of control.

Strong social media policies set expectations and parameters for potential situations that could harm a company’s reputation. Company success relies on the right social media engagement, so make it easy with a good social media policy.

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Are Hashtags Still Relevant in 2024?

Are Hashtags Still Relevant in 2024?

By Kylie Stanley, PR Technician

The first ever hashtag was used in 2007, almost 17 years ago and since then hashtags have become a crucial part of social media. But with hashtags being 17 years old, are they still relevant to use? In this blog post, we will discuss whether your company should use hashtags and their importance.

The short answer is yes, hashtags are still relevant to use, but it’s vital to understand the benefits they possess.

Graphic of cartoon man with laptop sitting atop a hashtag with social media flags

Reaching potential customers

Hashtags allow for your target audience to find your brand by searching for appropriate hashtags. Searching and following specific hashtags allow for users to find your posts, which can help to grow your following and get potential new business. When using hashtags, make sure you’re using hashtags that are specific to your brand. This means that the people searching for these hashtags will be a more interested and engaged audience.

Social listening

Custom hashtags help to create a more well-rounded marketing strategy. By making something unique and specific to you and your brand, you can generate user-generated content when your customers use that hashtag. Hashtags also can give insight to customer behavior and help brands understand your audience better. Social listening tools can help you track hashtags related to your brand or products to identify the positive and negative conversations from your customers.

By social listening, you can also track relevant influencers within your niche that you could send products to.

Increasing organic reach

Using hashtags can increase your organic reach on social media platforms. As previously mentioned, hashtags help your content be seen from potential customers. Social media algorithms can also work to your advantage when using hashtags. The algorithm looks at every piece of content posted to the platform in order to prioritize the content to its users based on if it’s appealing or interesting. This includes looking at hashtags, the engagement of the post, caption and if it’s a photo or video.

If you still are not using hashtags to your advantage, then now is the time! You don’t want to miss out on potential customers that are easy to reach. Using hashtags correctly can play a key role in your marketing strategy and social media content. We don’t see hashtags going anywhere anytime soon, so make sure to incorporate them into your plan.

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Effective Marketing Tactics

Effective Marketing Tactics

By Kylie Stanley, PR Technician

Social media is an effective marketing tool for businesses to use to target their customers.

It’s not surprising that in a recent study from Wpromote in partnership with Ascend2, six in 10 respondents surveyed ranked social media as the most effective digital marketing channel at driving revenue. This is up from 50 percent last year and 57 percent the year before.

Social is the top revenue-driving channel and contributes the most to achieving top-of-funnel goals. Social is becoming a true full-funnel powerhouse for B2B marketers; in the past, marketers were more likely to use social platforms to drive brand awareness in the upper funnel, but this year, it topped the list of most effective bottom funnel channels for the first time. This is driven by the digital transformation that accelerated through the pandemic.

Brand awareness strategies are at the top of the funnel and are a critical focus for B2B brands. Next up was content marketing (49 percent), followed by email (45 percent), display advertising (36 percent) and paid search (32 percent).

Since the pandemic, social media has digitally transformed and continues to keep B2B buyers in mind by prioritizing their experience across different apps.

Social media is poised for budget growth: 56 percent say their social media budgets will increase this year, making this the area with the most consensus around budget growth. It’s followed by content marketing (52 percent), with fewer (34 percent) expecting to spend more on streaming TV.

To get the most out of budgets, whether you’re increasing by a lot, a little, or not at all, make sure to monitor your performance and move dollars between channels to follow demand.

Download the study here.

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