The emergence of social media has helped so many businesses to expand nevertheless social media can be a harsh mistress at times. Quite often this seems increasing true for small businesses who don’t have the time or money to employ someone to look after their company’s social media accounts full time. In saying that, just because a company is large and might even have a social media ‘expert’ to post for them doesn't necessarily mean they are better at social media engagement.

Expect trouble if you:

1. Don’t think it through. You need to decide up front what you’ll post (both words and images), how often to schedule your posts, what “voice” and “look” you’ll use, and who will keep your profiles up to date.

2. Let your accounts languish. The cardinal sin of social media is not sticking to a regular schedule of updates.

3. Broadcast instead of chat. Your presence in social media is about the conversation. If you’re blasting messages into the ether, you’re missing the benefits of engagement.

4. Use social media as advertising vehicles. That’s spam. Your customers will tune you out.

5. Autopost the same message across all media. This may have made sense back when Facebook, Twitter and the rest were new, but they’ve evolved into distinctly different formats that rarely produce optimal results if you treat them the same way.

6. Ignore or delete negative comments. Not only will you enrage the customers who posted them, but you’ll lose an opportunity to clarify, defend what you said, explain what happened, apologize or try to rectify the situation and turn it around.

7. Don’t respond quickly. One recent survey showed that a third of customers who contacted businesses through social channels expected a response within half an hour, regardless of the hour.

8. Fail to monitor your return on investment. Social media interactions are eminently trackable. You can monitor without much trouble which conversations, contests and offers are generating the most buzz.

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