Preventing social media mishaps to minimize bad dreams
Last night I awoke in a sweat, quickly grabbed my phone and looked at my twitter account (@rachelkaylor). I was relieved to find that my last last tweet was (ironically): “RT @PublicityGuru: HuffPost: The 7 Worst Twitter PR Fails http://huff.to/ihO40C”
Fortunately, it was not the awful image I had seen in my dream. Dream Rachel had mistakenly tweeted terrible, awful words about anything and everything. My dream supervisor (and I don’t mean dreamy) called yelling, “What on earth have you done? Didn’t we JUST talk about this?”
Yes dream supervisor, we did!
At our PR and Social Media team meeting yesterday, we discussed recent twitter mishaps and how easy it could be to mix up twitter accounts if they’re all linked together.
That’s why we set a few guidelines that everyone should follow:
- First and foremost, think before you tweet. If you’re angry at something, or someone, step quickly away from your Twitter account. In the end, it doesn’t do your reputation any good if you’re tweeting profanities.
- When using social media dashboards such as HootSuite or TweetDeck, make sure to triple check the account you’re posting to. Even if it’s not linked with your personal account, clients want THEIR news posted, not another client’s news.
- Same goes for mobile devices. If you’re using twitter from a mobile device, it can get confusing. If it’s linked to different accounts, be aware of which account you’re posting to, before you send it full speed into the twittersphere.
In the end, is it worth your job to tweet about how much you [blankity blank] hate traffic? I think you know the answer.
Some advice I would also throw in is to differentiate your personal and business accounts by associating different applications with them. I know I use Hootsuite for my companies accounts and Tweetdeck(Twitter for mobile) for all my personal tweets.
This ensures me, that I know where the tweets are going and coming from, when I open up the application.
Definitely! I do the same and so do a lot of our other employees. It’s just another precaution we should take! Thanks for the comment.