By now, you’re most probably aware that everyone from small businesses to multinational corporations out there needs some kind of social media presence. It’s a necessity as the percentage of the population on websites like Facebook and Twitter increases across all age ranges. It is now the first port of call for complaints for some people. Many see it as a much quicker and public way to alert you to a mistake. A failure to address these issues properly can lead to some very bad publicity. By concentrating on your social media properly you can avoid this.

So, for starters you need to ensure your accounts look active. If someone comes across your Twitter page and sees that nothing has been posted for four months, they just won’t bother. An active social media page is a good one. It makes it look like you are actively engaging with your customers. It’s generally a good idea of marketing anyway, so it should be something you’re doing already. Be sure to be active at different levels for different accounts Twitter is very proactive, while Facebook should be a lot more restrained. Make sure you’re not annoying people with spam.

As mentioned, people use social media to complain a lot more regularly now. A tweet is most probably going to get a quick, personalised response whereas calling up can end up taking a huge amount of time with no results. This is simply because the complaint is public. Anyone at all can see it and so companies are quick to fix the problem. This is because if they solve it properly everyone sees how great they are, while if they ignore it everyone sees how terrible they are.

It’s all about building up your reputation. If you get known for having a positive social media presence, that will reflect well on your company as a whole, It shows you’re willing to directly engage with your customers and help them out when things go wrong.

There are also some SEO benefits to using social media. SEO services are essentially the tactics that tend to be used by experts to get your website ranking higher in Google for certain terms, i.e., if you were an online accounting firm, you’d want to come top for “online accountancy”. If you build up an active and interested following, you can use that to help your sites get better results in Google. If you write interesting blog posts (with links to other company pages) and you can get them shared by all the people who follow you, those links will be given more weight by Google. It’s a simple way to increase visitors to your site.

You should also search out influencers in your field through things like Twitter. If you can post things that they will be interested in, it’s possible they will share it with their followers as well. This is a great way to increase the number of your Twitter followers and the side of the audience you can reach. It can be very easy to bring in leads through social media, as long as you are targeted in your approach There’s no point following everyone you come across, don’t be afraid to be a bit picky at times.

Joshua Danton Boyd is a contributor to Freelance Advisor, a wealth of information including invoice templates, tax advice and helpful tips.