Best Practices

Develop a Voice/Tone: Spending time to develop your accounts voice and tone is one of the most important steps in developing your social media sites.    You should create a tone that will be welcoming and resonate with your audience. 

Be active:  Developing social networks requires administrators to have an active presence.  You must have a constant stream of content and be able to respond to those that interact on your site.  Have a plan in place to make sure that you can make your account active prior to actually going live with the account. 

Engage with your audience:  Remember social media is about two-way communication.  Be responsive and stay relevant to those that are following your page.    

Handling negative posts:  Do not simply erase a comment or post if it is negative.   Think before you delete.    It is important not to delete all negative posts because your audience will feel like they do not have a voice and as a result your network will suffer.  Instead, carefully think about what the poster is saying and decide whether or not it is better to address the comment.  One of the biggest advantages of being on social media is that it provides you the opportunity to be proactive in addressing the negative comments that are being made.   Use that opportunity to either address an issue or provide a more direct service to your audience.   In most cases addressing the comment has a better outcome than simply deleting it.  However, if a comment is inappropriate in nature including threats, obscenity, a violation of intellectual property rights or privacy laws, or otherwise injurious or illegal it should be deleted.   Prior to deleting we suggest capturing a screen image of the post for your records and then deleting it.

Handling Negative Posts on Twitter

Twitter is the most public of the social media sites.   All posts can be seen by the public and they cannot be deleted.  For this reason it is important to manage negative posts.

Address negative posts in a proactive manner.  Do not ignore them in hopes that they will stop because potentially the negative Tweets may multiply. You want to prevent this from happening and provide assistance to the person. 

Managing negative posts on Twitter can be a little more challenging than on Facebook.  The nature of Twitter makes it sometimes difficult to see the true personal identity of an account.   This means that it may be difficult to simply send the person who tweeted an email.   We suggest when you receive a negative post send that person a Direct Message.  In that Direct Message ask them to provide you with an email address where you can further communicate with them and assist them.