Don't hand the keys of your twitter account to the work experience

There was a time, not so long ago, that social media was an afterthought. It was something which businesses didn’t want to spend time on but felt like they needed to have a presence on. They were right with the second part, but you also need to spend time conveying your company’s message and communicating effectively with potential and current customers. Like Vegas, what happens on twitter, stays on twitter.

meltdown

Highlighted last week by this unfortunate situation, it is becoming clear that social media is a place where you need to act exactly as you’d wish to act if you were interacting face to face with people. This is the new face to face. It only takes a retweet or a reply to be tagged to another person before the whole world seems to have lugged in on your conversation.

tips to follow

In light of the aforementioned incident, The Caterer have compiled a handy guide to how you can avoid a social media meltdown. The following five tips, put together by an expert panel, should help keep you on the straight and narrow.
1. Think before you tweet. It’s amazing how time can make even the most succinct, beautifully worded argument suddenly sound like pretentious spouting. Give it five minutes. If it still encapsulates your point, do it. Twitter storms happen because people lose their temper. Don’t lose yours. Be the voice of reason no matter what the provocation is.
2. Don’t take too much advice. Your Twitter feed should be a natural representation of your personality; people go to it for you, warts and all, and not some sanitised PR managed version that reeks of filtering.
3. Think about quality, not quantity. A wise friend once advised: ‘every time I go to tweet something, I spend ages getting it just right, then when I’m just about to hit Post, I look at it and say to myself… hold on, who gives a shit?’. Very wise words there.
4. Take it offline. DMs are your friend and Twitter thoughtfully gives you a lot more space to communicate with irate customers while keeping it out of the public eye.
5. Be transparent, up to a point. If you try to hide things you will lose trust and provoke more determined complainants into digging harder and looking to catch you out. That said, if you have no reason to give further information or comment, don’t – you’ll just fuel the fire.

customer feedback on simpleERB

In simpleERB you can not only add links to your social pages on the booking confirmation email but you can use these links alongside the customer feedback function. If you choose to receive customer feedback, the customer will receive a link, sent directly to them, which allows them to have a direct line to the restaurant which they may use to praise you but also might give them an outlet to give some negative feedback. In giving them a direct line, you hopefully can avoid them heading straight on to social media to criticise your business and you can resolve the issue directly with them.
Of course, you probably just receive good feedback so simpleERB allows you to fire back a quick reply with links to your social media pages asking them to post about their positive experience there.
Sign up for your free account at simpleerb.com