Social media isn’t a lever you pull that instantly generates leads. Instead, it’s more of a gradual dial that you need to turn up slowly, over time. Any mistake in the process could lead to your leads drying up.

These are seven of the most common mistakes people make in social media. Fix them and your leads will start flowing in.

1. You’re in the Wrong Social Media

No matter how well you’re executing your social media plan, if you’re in the wrong type of media, your message isn’t going to be heard.

If you’re regularly publishing on Facebook and Twitter but you’re primarily targeting CEOs who only spend time on LinkedIn, then your strategy really isn’t going to work.

Figure out where your market spends their time. Then create a strong presence in those social media networks.

2. Not Putting Likes and Shares on Your Website

Inspite all that social media has going for it, one thing it’s not great at is getting initial traffic. It’s great for following up with readers and it’s great for putting out viral content. But the best way to get people into your social media funnel is still your own website.

Make sure that you have the like buttons, share buttons, tweet buttons and follow buttons embedded on your website to generate healthy social media leads.

3. Not Making the Most of Captured Attention

When someone on social media comes to your page, you have something that’s extremely rare: Your customer’s attention.

Don’t waste it. Make sure that every inch of your social media real estate is filled with value adding, brand building material.

For example, if you have a Facebook page, make sure that you have everything filled out: make sure you have company information, website details, photos, etc all uploaded to your page.

4. Not Adding Value Through Content

Marketers who treat social media as just a platform to push advertising are missing the boat. Not only won’t they get buyers, but they’ll alienate their platform.

However, even marketers who don’t make that mistake still often don’t provide enough value. Giving updates about your company for example doesn’t count as adding value to your customers’ lives.

In order for your social media lead generation initiatives to really take off, it has to really make your customers’ lives better. You need to solve problems for your customers. You need to provide valuable content that your customers will be glad you shared.

5. Not Combining With Email

Social media shouldn’t be a standalone endeavour. Instead, social media lead generation activities should always be combined with other ways of following up with users, most notably email marketing.

Email marketing is more effective than social media for following up. Something that you post on a Facebook feed might never be seen by your followers. On the other hand, an email you send is guaranteed to be delivered.

That said, email doesn’t have the viral power of social media. People don’t pass on emails the way they share things on Facebook or Twitter. The best way to get both follow up power and viral power is to use both email and social media in conjunction to build social media leads.

6. Not Clearly Directing Users to Take Action

As a website owner or marketer, it’s easy to assume that other people know what you want them to do. However, the reality is most people really don’t.

Don’t assume that people know you want them to visit your site, to give you their email, to call your company or to buy your product. Tell them explicitly what to do.

One simple reason you might not be generating the kinds of social media leads you want is because you aren’t asking for the leads.

7. No Clear Tracking Metrics

Without clear metrics for tracking how you’re doing in social media, it can be very hard to tell if you’re succeeding or failing.

Pick one to five metrics that you want to optimize for, then steadily work to improve those metrics. For example, you might want to increase the number of times your content gets shared every time you post an update. Or you might just want to increase your visitor count.

These are seven of the most common reasons why social media users fail to generate leads. If the social media leads aren’t flowing in, look to see if you’re making one of these mistakes. If you are, that’s where your problem lies.

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Here are five tips to help you deal with this kind of negative customer-sourced publicity.

1. Never Ignore It

Perhaps the worst thing you could do when it comes to negative publicity is ignore it and hope that it disappears on its own. It simply doesn’t. In fact, if anything, it will get worse and worse until you handle the situation.

Assume that any piece of negative review online is an urgent action that needs attention.

2. Respond Quickly

If you respond fast, you’ll be able to keep the fire to a minimum. You’ll also send the message to your consumers that you care and that you’re paying enough attention to catch problems before they become too big.

To illustrate the point with a counter-example, take a look at United Airline’s “United Breaks Guitars” colossal blunder. When a customer who was a musician witnessed seeing his guitar thrown by United Airlines employees and found this guitar broken afterwards, he complained. United refused to pay for the damages.

He wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube. United Airlines didn’t respond until hundreds of thousands of people already saw the video. Today, the video has over 11 million views. Watch the video here.

If United Airlines had addressed the issue either on the spot or when it became clear that the customer was going to make an issue out of it, they would have saved the company millions of dollars in bad publicity.

3. Learn the Lessons

In every customer complaint is a lesson about how you can better run your business.

It takes a lot of effort to write a bad review. If someone went through the trouble of creating an account on a review site, spending half an hour typing up the review and then posting it online, chances are someone in your company did something very wrong.

Look at how you can improve your processes or policies. Look at whether or not you have an employee who’s damaging the reputation of your company. Look for ways to ensure that it never happens again.

4. Know What You Can and Can’t Do on Major Sites

Each industry has its major players in the review space. If you’re a hostel, it might be HostelWorld and TripAdvisor. If you’re a restaurant, it’s Yelp and CitySearch.

Furthermore, there are sites like RipOffReport and the Better Business Bureau that apply to just about any kind of business.

Get to know the policies of the most important sites. Know if you can or can’t take down reviews. Know if you can or can’t post your side of the story for any given review. Know if you can or can’t contest a complaint or resolve it and have it removed.

Knowing what you can and can’t do on these sites gives you more versatility when it comes to formulating an appropriate response.

5. Systematize It

If you’re running a small business, you might be able to handle negative customer reviews on a case by case basis. But as your business grows, you’ll want to develop a system for handling it instead.

Having a system for dealing with these kinds of issues will help you make sure that nothing slips through the cracks and goes unaddressed. It’ll also help make sure that issues get resolved in a timely manner. There should be a clear chain of command and clear delegation of who’s responsible for handling these issues.

If you follow these five tips, you’ll be able to handle the vast majority of negative customer remarks that are thrown at you. Though the ideal solution is of course not to get negative remarks at all, it pays to be prepared for when it happens.

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Marketing to these fans involves understanding and using a different kind of psychology. Fans can be unforgiving of marketers who don’t speak their language. Speak to them in the right way however and you’ll have earned yourself the most loyal followers in the world.

Here are five tips for marketing to sports fans on Facebook.

1. Host a Discussion

Sports fans love to talk. They love sharing notes about their teams, reliving highlights from the last game, bashing on opponents and even just plain chatter. They love sports and they love talking about sports.

Not everyone can make it to an in person sports game. Sports lovers want to feel like they’re part of the game experience, even if they’re not there. Hosting live discussions allows them to talk about the action as its happening even if they couldn’t make it to the game itself.

2. Talk About it All Week

One big mistake marketers make is only marketing to sports fan when there’s a game on. However, sports fans are sports fans 24/7 – They want to talk about it all day, all night, whenever they can.

Before a game, there’s the leadup. They can talk about the players, the matchup, who they think will win, trash talk the opponent, get excited, etc.

After the game, they can discuss what happened and celebrate or commiserate the results.

Don’t just market to them during game time. Market to them all week. Every day.

3. Get Some Team Interaction

If you have a large enough audience, try reaching out to the team itself to see if you can get a team member to do something for your group.

Even if it’s just something as simple as a quick shoutout from their Facebook account, it can make a big difference.

Of course, if you can get them to do something more elaborate like a video or a Q&A session, that’s even better.

Fans love to get real interactions with their teammembers. If you can bring them that, they’ll follow you to the ends of the world.

4. Get Creative

Bring your fans content that they’ll love. Come up with creative contests, content giveaways, exclusive interviews, live videos and anything else you can think of for content that your fans will love.

In between games, come up with different things that you can entertain your fans with. For example, create trivia polls that test your fans’ knowledge of their team. Or show replays with your own analysis of the game.

Or you could host specific discussion panels. For example, talk about whether or not a specific strategy was a good idea from the last game.

If you can give special rewards, such as free tickets to winners, that can also go a long way towards getting your fans excited.

5. Ask Them What They Want

With most audiences, marketers tend to just send whatever they’ve got at their audience and hope it sticks. With sports fans however, you’re dealing with much more of a community.

Instead of just marketing to them in the way that you think they want to be marketed to, try asking them what they want. Sports fans will often be willing to share great ideas that you can easily implement.

These five tips will help you connect with and market to your sports fans. Marketing to sports fans isn’t easy, as they’re truly a fanatical and dedicated bunch. But if you can earn their trust, that rapid excitement can turn into devotion towards your brand.

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By the wayside of course are dozens of other smaller networks. You’ve got Orkut, which started out as a national project and was quickly waysided to Brazil. You’ve got Ning, which allowed you to start your own social network. Then you’ve got networks that focused around specific topics, like Flickr, which focused around image sharing.

Each social media network had its own rise to fame and subsequent fade into oblivion. Is Google+ headed for the same direction?

Google+ is Different – Or Is It?

Google+’s launch was a spectacular event in social media history. It quickly got its first 5 million users, then ten million, then twenty million. By many accounts, it was the fastest growing social media network in history.

But then the growth started to taper off. Today, though there’s still a lot of buzz about this social network, it’s no longer in the limelight.

Many people believe that Google missed their chance by keeping the exclusivity window too long. There was a point in time where a lot of people wanted to get into Google+, but couldn’t because of a lack of invites. If Google had opened their doors then, they might have gotten a lot more users.

Instead, they kept the doors closed. Because the doors were closed, a lot of people simply lost interest. After they lost a lot of steam, Google+ finally opened to the public, with much less fanfare.

Does Google+ Offer Enough?

One common sentiment among social media experts is that people just won’t switch unless there’s enough of a reason. Switching from one network to another takes huge commitment.

People switched from Friendster to MySpace because MySpace allowed them to customize everything. It let people create their own page as they saw fit. Also, MySpace wouldn’t crash or slow down all the time like Friendster.

People switched from MySpace to Facebook because Facebook allowed them to stay in constant touch with all their friends. Facebook’s “feed” feature allowed people to constantly stay in touch with what the other people in their lives are up to.

What does Google+ bring to the table?

The main feature Google+ brings is circles. Circles allow you to add people selectively to different categories. You could add your close friends to a circle, your business contacts to a circle and your movie buddies to a third circle. You can then pick and choose who you want to share information with, selectively.

Another feature that Google+ brings to the table is hangouts. These are essentially free video conferences that can pop up at any free moment. If you started a hangout now, anyone who’s also online can join the hangout and have an impromptu chat.

Google+ also brings to the table much longer posts. On Facebook, your status update lengths are quite limited. You couldn’t post an entire article in the post contents. With Google+, you can. This makes Google+ much more powerful for sharing information and opinions.

The question is, is this enough? Does Google+ bring enough to the table to make people switch?

The Verdict is Still in the Air

Unfortunately, the verdict is still up for grabs. By and large, Google+’s unprecedented growth rate has tapered off. Much of the press attention has died down and the question remains: Will Google+ stick? Or will it become another tombstone in the social media graveyard?

Only time will tell. Most industry experts agree however, that if Google+ is to make a comeback, they’re going to have to jumpstart their growth in some way or another. At its current rate, Google+ will most likely be joining the ways of Friendster and MySpace.

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Here are four of the most important things to know before starting your social media contest.

#1 – The Legalities

When you’re doing an online contest, you should almost definitely have a lawyer look over your legal disclaimers and the contest as a whole to make sure you’re fully compliant.

Different states have different laws about what you can and can’t do in a contest. Sweepstakes can never require a purchase. Contests that are based on skill or participation have special rules as well.

Your contest will need to have appropriate disclaimers. These should be written by a lawyer. It’s important to realize that you can actually get sued if you don’t have your legalities down.

#2 – Understand Cheating

Cheating is an often under looked aspect of online contests. If there’s real monetary value to the prizes you’re offering, there’s a very good chance you’ll attract people who won’t play by the rules.

Forms of cheating include using proxy servers to vote on their own submission, hiring out voting or other processes overseas or even downright hacking.

Start by studying how contest players game various different kinds of systems. Then implement basic protections, such as one vote per IP, cookies to track users, etc.

Finally, check your logs regularly to see if there’s any suspicious activity. For example, if you suddenly see 2,000 users an hour coming from Vietnam voting on one user, you might start to get a little suspicious.

#3 – A Prizing Strategy

Having a great prize is at the heart of every successful contest. Your prize has to be good enough that people will spend time, put in energy and enroll their friends all for the chance to win.

If you want your contest to really take off, you’re going to have to have prizes that are worth at least hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Popular generic prizes include iPads, computers, gaming consoles, around the world tickets, vacations and cash cards.

Industry specific prizes tend to do really well. For example, if you’re in the fishing market, give away top of the line fishing rods worth hundreds of dollars. If you’re in the hotel market, give away a free 5 night stay at your hotel.

If your prizes are great, you could make a lot of other mistakes and still succeed. With bad prizes, you could do everything else right and people still won’t be excited about your contest.

#4 – A Viral Strategy

Finally, you need a strong strategy that gets people to pass your contest along to their friends. If you’re running the contest on social media, you need a strategy to get people sharing and linking your contest. 

How do you make that happen?

There are a few different ways you can do this. One common way is to use liking as a voting mechanism. In order to vote for their friends, people first need to come to your page and “Like” it.

Another common method is to post the results on a page that’s only visible to people who’ve liked your page. That way, if people want to follow their friends’ progress, they need to first like your page.

You can also center the contest around how many other people you can get to join the contest.

Spend some time thinking about the viral strategy of your contest. Why would people want to post your contest to their friends? How can you increase the virality of your contest?

These are the four most important things to think about before you launch your contest. On one hand, knowing the law and having proper anti-cheating provisions will help you protect yourself from losses. On the other hand, having stellar prizes and an effective viral strategy will help you skyrocket your contest’s success.

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Why is that?

Intranet Social Media Networks are Designed by IT, not UE

The people who design intranet social media networks are usually the IT department, not the user experience department. In other words, the people who actually design the network aren’t trained in design. They’re trained in programming, networks and packets.

As a result, the user experience of the social network is invariably a lot worse than the experience of other networks like Facebook or Twitter.

The people who tend to take up intranet social media networks tend to be the early tech adopters. While that’s all fine and good, the real power of inter-office networking comes into play when most of the office is on the network, not just one small subset.

So how can you fix this? How do you get the majority of the office on an intranet social media network?

#1: The Quality of the Network

The first and most important thing is to actively manage the quality of the network itself. This should be done with a push in the beginning, but it should also be an ongoing process.

Ask your employees: What do they want from a social media network? What kind of things would they want to communicate about? What special features – Such as task management, milestones, confidential memos, filesharing – do they want?

Try to make the network as useful as possible. Also try and make it as intuitive, user friendly and enjoyable as possible.

Get your user experience and design staff involved. Creating a social media network for your staff is similar to creating one for the general public. It needs to be well designed, easy to use and intuitive. Just because they’re getting paid doesn’t mean they’re going to want to use something that’s clunky and hard to navigate.

Make sure you have a great intranet social media network first, before trying to get people on board.

#2: Market the “Product” to Your Employees

The next step is to actively cultivate your employees’ participation. This is an often overlooked step by management.

The thinking often goes that if you build it, your employees will use it. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. If your employees can’t easily see how it’ll make their job easier or make them more productive, chances are they won’t use the system at all.

To get them to use the system regularly, you need to make sure the benefits of the system are clearly spelled out to them. They need to really understand what they can get from using an intranet social media network.

Research has shown that using these social networks can lead to better communication, more innovation, fewer conflicts, more trust, more sharing of ideas, better product designs, improved sales and marketing ideas and increased revenue.

It can also lead to more innovation, reduced confusion, faster communication, more trust, better products, better sales funnels, more revenue.

It can also make your employees’ jobs easier. It can help remove the stress of going through several layers of management or stress from poor intra-office communication.

Whatever the main benefits of your social network are, make sure they’re clearly communicated to your employees.

#3: Change the Culture

In order to really get people to use the system, you need to integrate it into your culture. If your office culture is completely detached from your office social network, even if you get people to use it, the usage rate will gradually taper off.

One prime example of a company who did this well is Zappos. With Zappos, every time you come into work you’re presented with the company’s social network at the door, before you walk into your office. It’s part of the check-in process.

You get to learn about one other member of the team. You learn about their hobbies, their job title and any other information they wanted to provide. Then you go to work.

This one culture shift has made many chance meetings in the hallways possible. It also got people used to using internal social tools to communicate.

Make your internal social network part of your company’s cultural fabric. If you do so, your adoption rate will be very high.

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Brand ambassadors can’t be “hired.” They can only be earned. Great companies turn many of their customers into brand ambassadors.

When someone has a great experience at a company, they tell their friends. People want to share stories about great service. People also want their friends to experience great service. If you really create a satisfied customer, you’ll naturally create brand ambassadors who help spread your brand.

On the flip side are people who actively seek to hurt your brand. It rarely happens, because in general people want to help rather than hurt. In order for someone to want to actively hurt your brand, you’ll need to have really mistreated them or underperformed their expectations.

According to IBM, customers will usually give you as many as ten warning signs before turning against you.

So how do you cultivate brand ambassadors rather than brand haters? How do you create a fanatic fanbase of users that try to evangelize your product wherever they go? Make sure you follow these five guiding principles.

1. Consistency

In a survey of restaurant customers, people were asked questions about why they regularly ate at a certain venue. Was it the service? Was it the food? Was it the price? Was it the location?

When the results came in, researchers were surprised to find that the #1 thing customers looked for was consistency.

They wanted to know that they could go to a certain restaurant and have a certain experience. They knew what kind of service they’d get, what they’d have to pay and what kind of food they can expect.

Consistency is very important to customers. If you want to cultivate a long-term customer, it’s tantamount that they know what they can expect from you. Be consistent.

2. Be Product Centered

What is it that separates your brand from other people?

In the short run, marketing, branding, outreach and other such techniques can mask poor products. However, in the long run, the success or failure of a company really comes down to whether one product is better than the other.

Take the example of Google. Before Google, there was Yahoo, AltaVista and a number of other search engines. After Google, there were dozens of search engines to start as well.

Google had no marketing budget. They only had word of mouth. For a long time, they lagged behind their competitors. But slowly and surely, they gained market share, for one simple reason: Their product was better.

In the short run, it might seem like being product centered doesn’t pay. However, in the long run, creating a top notch product is what will put your company on the map.

3. Cultivate Human Connections

Human connection is one of the most valuable and rare commodities in business today. Many brands have simply turned into processes, programs and systems that nobody can really interact with.

People crave human connection. If people connect with one person from your store or have a stellar experience with someone from customer service, they’ll remember that interaction for life.

Take the example of Starbucks. Whether you love or hate their coffee, it’s undeniable that they’ve created a hugely successful company.

But, according to Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks, what keeps people coming back isn’t just the coffee. It’s the people. People come back for the connection with the baristas. The customers to come back regularly get to know them by name, the baristas learn about their kids, and so on.

It’s not the coffee, it’s the human connection. Try to cultivate it in your company.

4. Respond Quickly

Customers hate waiting. In fact, fear of having to wait is a big reason that people don’t buy products online and instead go to a store. It’s why people would rather experience discomfort in their lives than spend 20 minutes on hold.

If you can speed up the processes, all else being equal, customers will flock to your brand. Dominos Pizza took advantage of this with their “30 minutes to your door or it’s free” ad campaign.

5. Give Them Something to Talk About

Even if people love your brand, if you don’t give them something to talk about, you’re not going to get much buzz.

Two good examples of this are Toshiba and Apple.

Toshiba makes stellar laptops. There are some absolutely die-hard Toshiba fans out there who’ll buy nothing but Toshiba laptops. But we seldom hear about Toshiba, simply because there’s not much to talk about. They make good laptops – That’s all.

Apple, on the other hand, is a professional at creating sensational things to talk about. Their product launches are masterpieces in showmanship. Every year, they launch a new product that gets their fans buzzing. They create commercials and online communities to make their products shine even more.

If you want people to talk about you, give them something to talk about.

These are the five tenants of creating brand ambassadors. Follow them, and your customers will talk about your product and spread the word without you having to lift a finger.

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Though a lot of different metrics have come and gone in the social media world, there’s still no definitive way to measure the return on investment in the social sphere.

So is social media worth the investment? The key thing to remember is that social media really isn’t a ROI-based activity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re trying to decide whether or not social media is a good investment for you.

#1: You’re Beginning a Relationship

Think of social media as if you’re paying to go to a party where many of your customers will be at. How do you measure that in terms of ROI?

It’s extremely difficult, in large part due to how difficult it is to quantify relationships. Someone you meet at the party could introduce you to a new friend, who 6 months later refers you to a big client. If you had never gone to the party you wouldn’t have met this person, but it’s very hard to quantify that client as a “return” on your investment in going to the party.

Social media is very similar. It help you create and cultivate social relationship, which can have a domino effect that can’t always be measured.

#2: Learn From Your Customers

Social media differs from traditional media in one important way: You get to learn from your customers.

If you were just running TV ads, you’d get the same branding effect, but you wouldn’t get to hear back from your customers about how you’re performing. You won’t get to hear suggestions about how to improve your product or get early warnings of potential problems.

Social media is one of the purest ways you can stay in touch with you customers. It’s just not realistic for most businesses to stay in one-on-one contact with their customers; but through social media you can easily stay in touch with a lot of people at once.

#3: Social Media is Branding, Not Response

Trying to measure the direct effects of social media on the bottom line is very difficult. It’s no different than any other branding oriented marketing.

Let’s say you decide to run a new TV ad campaign for 6 months. TV ads do need to run for a long time before they begin to take effect; as you need to make sure it saturates your target market and give the branding message time to sink in.

Within those 6 months, any number of things could change. The economy could tank or take off, news relating to your company could be good or bad, a competitor could launch a new product or go out of business, so on and so forth.

While you can easily track a correlation between a TV ad campaign and sales, it’s hard to track causation.

It’s the same with social media. Social media doesn’t result in direct sales. Instead, it changes the way your viewers see your brand.

If someone has a relationship with you on a social media website, they’re a lot more likely to want to buy from you or visit your website again in the future. Much like TV is difficult to track, social media is also difficult to track because there’s no way to tie customers directly to sales results.

Tracking Social Media ROI

In summary, how can you track social media ROI? You have to use indirect metrics.

Using metrics like how long visitors stay on your site, how often they pass on your content, how engaged your customers are and how many replies you get when you post a piece of content, you can get a rough gauge of how your campaign is performing.

That, when combined with the total impressions your media generates, can help you get a rough sense of what kind of returns you’re generating.

Tracking social media ROI isn’t an exact science. There are many ways it can benefit your company that can’t be measured. However, by and large, the consensus is that investing in social media makes sense. That’s why it’s such a hot topic today in the world of business.

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Where they’re weak is often where you have the advantage. You can avoid these kinds of mistakes if you’re careful, because it’s much easier for you to change course if you see red flags.

Here are five of the biggest social media blunders made by Fortune 500 companies, analyzed so you can learn from them.

Mistake #1: Unclear Communication

Whenever you put a message out to your market, you should make sure it’s crystal clear and that there are no conflicting messages.

Google made a big blunder with this when they released Gmail on April Fools Day.

Traditionally, Google had done an April Fools joke every year prior. For example, one year they announced Google PigeonRank, where websites were ranked by pigeons instead of technology.

When Google announced Gmail, most of the world took it as a joke. At the time, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail were both offering only 10 MBs in storage and Gmail comes out with 1 GB.

It took several days before the announcement was actually taken seriously and by that time they lost a lot of the initial momentum. According to a CNN article, Google’s VP of product did say that they did a bit caught up in the April Fools spirit even while launching a real product.

Mistake #2: Telling the User They’re Wrong

When Apple released the iPhone 4, there was a small bug with the antennae system. If you held the phone without a case in a specific way where you were touching one of the corners with your finger, you would completely kill the reception.

Steve Jobs’ response? “Don’t hold your phone that way.”

While Jobs was right that the bug really wasn’t that big a deal, his response was posted all over social media and was interpreted as them not caring about what the customer thought.

The whole ordeal almost killed the launch; until Jobs changed course and announced free cases for all iPhone 4 purchases.

Mistake #3: The Insincere Apology

An insincere apology can be even worse than no apology at all. Nothing tells your fans “we didn’t get the message” more than an apology that didn’t really acknowledge the mistake.

Chapstick was a prime example of this. When Chapstick’s “Where Do Lost Chapsticks Go?” ad generated a social media firestorm, they first started by deleting comments. When they realized what a bad idea this was, they came out with an apology.

Essentially, they blamed the ad deletions on Facebook’s policies. Furthermore, they never even admitted they were wrong. As a result, many of their long time fans felt alienated.

Learn more here: Facebook Fail: Chapstick Turns Discussion Into Disaster

Mistake #4: Restricting Your Customer’s Free Speech

In 2010, Wal-Mart decided to restrict what customers could say on Facebook. This created a huge uproar in the social media space.

Instead of just posting complaints of disagreements on Wal-Mart’s wall, dissatisfied customers went on a posting spree on other pages.

Instead of having a real dialogue with their customers, Wal-Mart essentially stifled discussion on their own pages. As a result, they got even more negative publicity, but distributed all over cyberspace rather than just in one place. A far worse result than just letting people express their own opinions.

Learn more about this here: A Failed Facebook Marketing Campaign

Mistake #5: Not Being Transparent With Mistakes

Late 2011, Sony’s PSN online gaming system was hacked, exposing personal data from more than 93,000 accounts. It was estimated that over 32,000 credit card numbers were also exposed.

What did Sony do? They covered it up for a week.

Although they did eventually come out with the story, the damage was done. Consumers were furious that their personal data was compromised for a week, allowing hackers time to sell or use their credit card numbers without any notice from Sony.

Even in the announcement, Sony was rather vague and shifted blame from themselves. The lashback from social media was very clear: People were angry and distrustful of Sony. Not because they got hacked, but because of their poor communication in the crisis.

These are five prime examples of how not to run your social media. Your social media should be a lively two-way dialogue between you and your consumers, rather than a way to portray a standoffish brand. Avoid the mistakes above to help cultivate a healthy and vibrant online relationship.

This article is a follow-up to our earlier post How to Use Google+ to Promote Your Product or Service.

In social media, Google+ brand pages are the way of the future. Using Google+ brand pages, you can create an informative, interactive profile for your fans on Google+ to connect with you. Few companies today are taking full advantage of what Google+ brand pages have to offer.

The easiest way to access your brand page is to go to your own Google+ page. Just click the drop down menu under your username to switch to your brand page’s view. Here you can edit the page, add people to circles and post status messages.

Here are top 9 tips & tricks for using Google+ brand pages to their full potential.

#1 – Creating an Easy to Reach URL

By default, Google+ gives you a custom URL that’s fairly difficult to read or remember. For example, your URL might be something like “plus.google.com/8723570370197390157.”

To make this easier for people, create a redirect on your own website to your Google+ brand page. For example, people should be able to reach this page by going to www.yourwebsite.com/googleplus/

You can also use Google+’s URL shortener to create a better URL on Google’s domain.

#2 – Add Buttons to Your Site

Want to make it easy for people to find your Google+ page on your site? Want to put live feeds of your status updates on your sites? Want to make it so people can re-post whatever you said with one click of a button?

It’s easy. Just add the respective Google+ buttons or widgets to your site. Access these under the “Get Started” menu in your brand page.

#3 – Don’t Share Your Visitor Count for the First Few Months

If you see that a page only has a handful of visitors, chances are you’re not going to want to visit that page. In other types of social media, like Facebook or Twitter for example, there’s not a whole lot that you can do about this.

However, with Google+, you can choose to hide your follower count. While this isn’t a good long term strategy, it can be very useful in the short term.

#4 – Give Great Resources

Google+ gives you the ability to add as many links as you want to your profile. The links can point back to content on your own website or to other people’s sites.

Make liberal use of this feature to point your users to the best possible resources for their problems.

#5 – Upload Stellar Photos

Some people like to interact with brands through status updates, but a lot of people prefer to use photos. They get much more of a visceral experience from seeing photos of an event or of a product than just reading a description.

Upload professional photos to your Google+ page to create a more lasting impression

#6 – Scan Your Circles Regularly

When someone adds you to their circles, you’ll have the ability to then add them to your circles in return.

If you don’t add someone to your circles, they won’t see anything you post. If you have people who’ve added you but you haven’t added them back, you’re “wasting” social goodwill.

Make it a habit to check your friends list regularly and add people who aren’t already in a circle.

#7 – Segment Your Readers

Perhaps Google+’s most powerful feature is their ability to segment where each post goes. You can post different things to your list in New York versus San Francisco. You can say one thing only to newcomers and different things to long time followers.

Use circles to craft the most powerful message possible for each group of your audience.

#8 – Hide Tabs That You Aren’t Using

By default, Google+ chooses what tabs it displays along the top of your profile. If it’s using tabs that you don’t want to be there, you can choose to disable it.

Just click on the specific tab and uncheck the box that says “Show this tab on your profile.”

#9 – Post Regularly

Much like any other kind of social media, Google+ has a running feed. If you post often, you’ll ensure that your content will frequently land in front of your visitor’s feed. If you don’t post often, your page won’t be on your visitor’s radar at all.

These are a few ways you can make sure you have a top notch Google+ brand page. Spend some time perfecting your Google+ page. After all, Google+ is the fastest growing social media network in history.