10 social media tips when commenting and responding to customers online [Infographic]

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Take a look at almost any survey about social media and how businesses use it, there’s one clear constant – not only is business use increasing, but also the need for helping business employees  understand how to use social media is increasing. Rewards for doing this well and risks if mistakes are made, are very real.

While there’s a huge focus on the big-picture aspect of understanding how businesses can best develop a social media plan and guidelines, let’s not overlook some basic and practical fundamentals that people will encounter day to day, like writing blog posts and making comments on posts.

No one wants to go through a baptism of fire as one well known company experienced on Facebook in 2010, where conversation rapidly became confrontational due, largely, to its approach to moderating and making comments.

You’d think it was pretty straightforward, right? Actually it is – your common sense will guide you best – but there are some key aspects to consider when posting online on a professional basis.

With that in mind, we’ve developed a handy infographic for small to medium-size businesses to help their employees assess how to comment and respond effectively on behalf of their company, whether this is on a blog post, a tweet, a Facebook wall post, or anywhere else.

This infographic contains insights from the social media toolkit

Feel free to use/share our infographic – grab the embed code below to add it to your website or blog.

<a href="http://en.community.dell.com/dell-groups/small-business/p/socialmediatoolkit.aspx">socialmedia<img src="/uploads/2012/05/0045.DELITP_5F00_Infographic_5F00_v10_5F00_Feb2_5F00_2012-1.png" alt="Infographic: Commenting and Responding to Comments online" width="***" height="****" /> </a>

The message here is simple – providing your small and medium business employees with useful tips will help them confidently embrace social media for the significant business benefits that it represents, whilst mitigating risks as far as possible.

Is this picture worth a thousand words? Is there anything you’d add (or subtract) in the infographic to make it even more useful?  *Like* and share with your peers if you find this useful and find the flow logical when evaluating or making comments.

This post is one in a series of posts related to Dell’s social media resource centre and the Social media toolkit – A guide to how small and medium businesses can make the most of social media

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About the Author: Kerry Bridge

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