The goal your business was hopefully looking to accomplish with social media was to engage with your current customers and acquire new ones as well. In today's market, a business must embrace social media as a marketing tool to help build new relationships and mature current ones.  The last thing anyone wants to happen is to have your social networking effort become a method whereby customer turnover and loss of revenue for your business is a result.  Small businesses, using social media to grow their brands, should closely monitor incoming messages as customers will reach out to you on social networks at their convenience.  Before posting content on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and the other various social outlets you must take sensitivity in writing and developing your post. 

There are a number of things you can do as a business owner to ensure that your social media efforts help grow your business.  To start, you must first familiarize yourself with the type of post to avoid.   The following is a list of content subject or content matters your business should avoid posting or commenting on within social media networks and blogs:

1. Nudity

2. Offense Language or Morally Offensive Content

3. Explicit Language

4. Racial matter or Racist statements

5. Sexuality matters or sexist statements

6. Religion or Religious quotes or bible verses

7. Politics

8. Competitors Content

9. Advise or Unhealthy (bad for health)

10. Alcohol Related or Cigarette Related

11. Defamation of a group, business, brand, or persons

12. Content which suggest your business is choosing a side

13. Personal Commentary on a subject or matter

14. Insults

15. Content the overly favors one race of people over another

16. Content that drives the viewer to a competitors page or networked affiliates

17. Endorsements for political candidates

18. Copyrighted material

19. Raunchy material or Objectionable material

20. Negative information or Untrue information

21. Misleading information or False advertising

22. Information harmful to children or adults

23. Terrorist statements

24. Hurtful statements

25. And anything that would be counterproductive to your overall social media objective.

The bottom line regarding social media campaigns is that the world is a very sensitive environment.  Social Media has pulled businesses,  established through print advertising, closer to the edge of crossing the lines.  Avoiding the top 25 offensive social media posts listed above will help your business deliver a successful social media campaign.   Be prepared to adjust and optimize your social media post, because standards constantly change as more and more businesses cross the social media lines.

Here is a recent example of some content posted by a big name brand company (famous... now infamous Soup Maker).  The marketing department that created the post meant no harm but caused a ton of negative press for the brand.  Read more on this here:

http://marketingland.com/spaghettios-remembers-pearl-harbor-day-on-twitter-67494

After reading the top 25 post to avoid you should know that the Twitter post crossed the following lines:

    • Personal Commentary on a subject matter

    • Objectionable material (although not known as objectionable until the negative responses occurred)

    • Content which suggest a business is choosing sides

    • Counterproductive to the overall objective (I would think….)

If you post any content that begins to generate negative press we suggest that the post be removed, and an apology drafted on the same social network outlet that the post originated.