Business and Social Media

Being a social media junkie, I look at a lot of profiles of businesses and day after day I see them making the same mistakes. I think a lot of them forget that their official social media profiles are like customer services. Here are some that really annoy me:

• Ignoring questions on social media (and inconsistently)
• Posting updates after that so everyone can see that they’ve DEFINITELY seen the query.
• It can go the other way, they can just be a bit too enthusiastic and annoy you with a million updates a day. *click* unfollow!
• Retweeting EVERY single tweet they are mentioned in
• Stalking Twitter for every possible misspelling and indirect reference to them and replying to them all. It’s just a bit creepy if it’s too frequent.
• Having boring Twitter and Facebook feeds. Why would anyone want to read that? If it's all about you, you're not engaging.

On the other side, there are some companies that have great social media presences and realise how powerful social media can be (side note: I hate the amount of times I've had to use the term 'social media' in this post. Makes me sound like an idiot). A lot of them give great customer service, have interesting feeds and alert me to stuff that's actually interesting. Most of you will remember the @shippamspaste account which got closed down as it wasn't official by Shippam's (bet they're kicking themselves now), but was endearing, inept and alerted many people to a virtually forgotten brand. Bad move, Shippam's Paste.

Here's who are INTERESTING businesses.

• @arenaflowers - so funny. Mostly not about flowers but I'll bet they've got loads of business from it.
• @betfairpoker - totally surreal and its users actually complain when it post stuff about poker. But one of my favourites nonetheless.
• @nationalrailenhq - informative and occasionally posts amusing puns. Not sure it's quite worth the hype as it's by no means the best of its kind but entertaining nonetheless.
• @gauthiersoho ok, so I'm a bit biased, but: live-tweets wine matching of TV shows, replies to tweeters asking questions and controversial tweets!