To present your message in the best possible way, courteous business communication make your job much, much easier. Now more than ever, there are ample opportunities to accidentally offend someone. A healthy dose of courtesy is the easiest way to try to avoid your message being mistaken.
Of course, there are always those who are looking for a reason to take offence. It’s not worth your while to indulge them. They’re called trolls for a reason. Leaving them alone under their bridge of ignorance is the only way to deal with them.
Uppercase is shouting.
I know you might be really excited and want to add emphasis to something. Please, please use formatting or make just one or two words uppercase. A whole sentence or paragraph is excessive and will be read as a shouted message.
No text speak
It’s OK for conversation between you & your friends, but unless you’re in an industry that caters solely to the younger generation it has no place in any business communication. That includes Twitter. Abbreviate when you must, but make sure that your message is clear and not missing all its vowels!
Hashtags are not conversation.
Using a hashtag or two in any social media post is a good thing, #having #a #conversation #consisting #entirely #of #hashtags #is #not #a #good #thing. In fact, it’s really annoying and most people probably won’t reach the end of even a short sentence.
If you’re emailing someone, address them in the email.
What I mean by this is if you’re emailing a group, by all means just start the email with a greeting. However, if you’re emailing a person use a “Hi Name” or “Dear Mr. Name” or “Good morning Name”, even just “Name”. Don’t just start the email. This also applies to responding to emails via your phone.
Sign off your messages.
Regardless of whether it’s email or text, don’t assume that your recipient knows who you are. In fact, you should have an email signature block set up on both your phone and desktop email clients. The signature should include your name, your business name and your telephone number at a minimum (in text, not an image).
Watch your manners.
If you wouldn’t say something to a person standing in front of you, don’t do it on social media. It constantly amazes me how rude some people are on social media. Once or twice there’s a possibility that sometimes it’s just an accidental bad turn of phrase, but if it happens regularly, it’s just showing a lack of manners and respect for other people.
Don’t air dirty laundry publicly.
We all like to have a whinge every now and then, but your businesses social media accounts is no place to do it. If you’ve got something to say about someone else, either bring it up with them or keep your peace about it. If you feel like complaining about something a supplier, a contact or a customer has done – then either do it in private, or keep quiet. Remember, everything you on social media is public whether you’re intending it to be or not. So unless you want to give the impression of being a passive aggressive whinger, it’s best left to less public forums.
Now, it’s probable that you think some of these don’t really matter – and a lot of the time you could be right. The problem is that the recipients of your communications are judging you and your business by the messages they receive. If messages from your business are full of errors and in your own private shorthand you can’t blame potential clients from thinking that the rest of your business is built on shortcuts and a “near enough is good enough” philosophy.
Remember that you won’t be judged by your standards, you’ll be judged by the standards of the people seeing your messages and unless you’re happy to alienate that section of the population (and everyone who values their opinion), then you need to craft your messages to appeal to them. Courteous business communication is an easy way to do that.
