These Companies Could be Making Better Use of Their Social Media Accounts!

On this blog, we have explored numerous businesses that are successfully leveraging social media in order to increase brand awareness and sell more items. By looking at the strategies used by companies like Coca-Cola, Blendtec, Old Spice, Pepsi and Red Bull, we’ve unveiled a number of actionable tips to help ensure success across all these different platforms.

But while we can learn a lot from success, there’s also much we can learn from failure and missed opportunities. Here we will look at some companies that have social media accounts, but really aren’t making the best use of them. Hopefully this will serve as a wakeup call to start taking full advantage of your own opportunities by seeing the mistakes they’re making as they ignore their own.

T-Nation

This is a supplement retailer aimed at bodybuilders and strength athletes. The business model is simple and highly effective: you head over to the site to read the latest training advice and news, you get inspired and then you buy one of their products.

But while this general business model is smart, their presence on YouTube is seriously lacking. It appears that T-Nations only objective on their YouTube channel is to host short clips they can use on their articles. In other words, if you subscribe you will treated to five second videos of people squatting or doing press-ups. It’s pretty uninspired and likely to lead to a lot of unsubscribes – though it is improving recently.

Hasbro

Hasbro is the toy company behind Transformers, GI-Joe and many other popular toys. Hasbro’s business lends itself perfectly to Instagram, as they could show off their toys in cool positions that would impress parents and more importantly help children to get excited for their products.

But alas, Hasbro isn’t anywhere to be seen on the site. This is even stranger when you consider how many pictures other people are taking on there for them.

Café Nero

In the past, we’ve celebrated Starbucks’ approach to social media, which makes it even more glaringly obvious that Café Nero just isn’t puling its weight. The closest thing you can find to a Twitter account has 84 tweets and doesn’t look official, while there’s no Facebook page at all. Sure, Nero is technically a franchise, but it wouldn’t hurt the company to invest some money into online marketing for the sake of the managers or their own profits.

Fortune 500 Companies

It’s a big category, but a lot of Fortune 500 companies simply aren’t present on social media of any kind. This infographic shows how few Fortune 500 companies had accounts on different social media accounts or public blogs only a few years ago.

Some of the reason for this might be a fear of ‘getting to the party late’ with a social media account that looks entirely empty at least to begin with. The reality though is that it only gets more difficult if you put it off and everyone has to start somewhere.

But while there may be a lot of companies dropping the ball on social media, this is actually good news for small businesses. Learn from their mistakes and make sure you do invest into Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and you might just be able to steal some market share from those sleeping giants.