While social media is a great way to interact with people online, promote yourself or your business, and share information that’s important to you, when used incorrectly, your time spent on social media could also come back to haunt you. Especially for businesses or public figures, what you post on social media will be criticised and dissected by everyone that sees it. Knowing this, it’s vital that you take care when using your social media accounts.
To help you in doing this, here are three things to consider before posting on social media as a public figure or business.
When To Use Your Personal Account
For many businesses and public figures, they have multiple accounts that they have created for both personal and professional purposes. So to save yourself some trouble, it’s good to know when you should be using your personal account rather than posting to your professional account.
According to Brian Martucci, a contributor to Money Crashers, it’s best for you to keep your professional social media accounts for only your professional interests. If you have something that’s more personal or that’s irrelevant to your business that you want to share, it might be best to put this content on your personal social pages. By doing this, you may be able to avoid a lot of the issues you could otherwise run into.
The Dangers Of Being Offensive
In many situations, businesses and public figures will find the most success if they can avoid offending their audience. However, if your product or image is naturally political or at odds with the views of certain people, like if you sell AR-15 rifles or are very involved in politics, managing your messaging should be your goal.
As part of this, Allison Lips, a contributor to SocialMediaWeek.org, recommends that you try to think about your target audience and if the content or information you’ll be sharing will be authentic to them and really speak to them in the right way. If it will, then you can’t really control if other people will be offended. But if you’re just sharing something to be offensive, you might want to rethink that post.
Any Permissions You May Need
When posting on social media, every person or business needs to be careful that they aren’t sharing something that could be copyrighted. However, as a business or public figure, you’ll want to be extra careful about this.
The last thing you want to be dealing with is a lawsuit because of something you shared on your social media accounts. So to avoid this, Shawn Kong, a contributor to Medium.com, advises that you only share information or content from an outside source if you have express permission from them.
If you’re a business owner or a public figure, consider using the tips mentioned above to survey your posts before sharing anything on social media.