Social Media Can Give Your Business a Voice, Just Make Sure it’s Yours

When you go into business nowadays, it has essentially become a prerequisite to claim a social media account to represent you, sooner rather than later. The city of Denver, Colorado, has delivered a relatively harmless but still resonant example of why this is.

There is an Instagram account, cityofdenver, that features a wide variety of crowdsourced images depicting the scenery and personality of the city. While these photos are admittedly gorgeous and show the city in a diverse and positive light, officials in Denver can take no credit for curating its content. This is because city officials haven’t the slightest idea of who runs the Instagram page.

Since it was first started, the account (which once claimed itself to be “The official account of The Mile High City”) has accumulated 149,000 followers. Most amazingly, the city has no plans to try to take ownership of the account. As a representative of the city’s internal marketing department stated, “We haven’t asked them to give it up, since they had it first and they really do have fabulous content.”

While this approach has worked for Denver (so far), it isn’t very likely that such a situation would turn out so well if it was your business that found itself with a rogue social media profile. Just imagine what could happen if someone beat you to the punch and created an account “for you” with less-than-honorable intent. Your reputation could quickly suffer significant damage if a mischievous scammer decided to post in your name, or worse, a competitor or other party with a vested interest in your failure.

To avoid this, you should secure business accounts on all appropriate social media profiles as quickly as possible. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer guides to help you set up a profile exclusively for your business’s use. While there are definite advantages to using these pages to interact with your clients, you don’t even necessarily need to use them if you’re just trying to prevent others from potentially giving you a bad name.

Properly utilizing social media can bring mutual benefit to your business and your patrons. Whether you share information pertinent to your clients and customers to better communicate your availability and services, or communicate with your followers to improve their experience and accept their feedback, your business will simply be providing yet another service through the power of social media.

Have you dabbled in using social media for your business before? Let us know what it was like in the comments!