Social media has tremendous potential to make your brand look really, really good. Not only can it drive referrals and leads, but it can increase your brand recognition and loyalty. It can open up lines of communication with your customers, and endear you to your target market.

That’s why it’s such a shame when brands misuse social media. As the public face of your company online, using social media inappropriately can quickly lead to customer alienation and complete PR meltdowns. Following are some of the most disastrous, embarrassing, yet completely avoidable social media blunders we’ve seen over the past few years.

Misusing Hashtags

Hashtags are one of the best ways to reach outside your current sphere of followers, particularly on Twitter and Instagram. Posting relevant hashtags with your tweets and images can lead to new users finding and potentially following you. Posting irrelevant hashtags, on the other hand, can have embarrassing and even catastrophic consequences.

Take DiGiorno Pizza’s recent Twitter mishap, for example. You may be familiar with the now ubiquitous hashtag, #WhyIStayed. It was created to be used by survivors of domestic violence to explain why they stayed and why they ultimately left abusive relationships, however DiGiorno’s social media manager had an outside-the-box strategy for using it: “#WhyIStayed You had pizza.”

Needless to say, Twitter users weren’t fond of this inventive use of the hashtag, and DiGiorno’s has been bending over backwards to apologize ever since.

Neglecting Customer Service

Some brands are still under the impression that social media is primarily about posting, tweeting and pinning. While this is certainly a big part of social media marketing, more and more consumers are expecting brands to be present and active in terms of responding to questions and complaints.

I recently got a chance to witness an unfortunate series of interactions on Facebook; unfortunate because a once-thriving company announced they were shutting their doors and liquidating their inventory. But also unfortunate because they forgot to cancel their scheduled posts.

While customers came to the Page in droves to complain of orders not being shipped, Lia Sophia’s social media team forgot to stop promoting their products. The products, remember, that many customers had ordered the month before, and still hadn’t received.

Lacking Sensitivity