Building an Online Brand Through Social Media
Building an Online Brand Through Social Media For any SME building a strong online brand in 2021, Social Media is an indispensable part of an effective marketing strategy. In a previous blog post, we explained why building a brand and building authority is important, the difference between the two concepts, and we shared our top recommendations on how to do that through writing unique blog content. The focus of this article is to share with SMEs our recommendations for building an authentic brand online through Social Media. It is important to understand that marketing and promoting your business on Social Media does not end once you have created a profile or company page. First, customize the graphics on your profile or page to match or resemble your website and overall brand look and feel. Then, and this is the part that requires ongoing focus and commitment, interact with your followers and fans to build authority in your industry. Our Recommendations On How To Utilize Social Media To Build Brand Image And Authority: 1. Customize your presence on each platform to be consistent with your brand image and with each other Imagine a prospective business connection or customer landed on your social profile, and they doubted even for a second whether it belonged to your company. This is something that you should try to avoid when designing any graphics or content for online use. Maintaining a consistent image across all social media platforms is one of the most important parts of building a brand online. Whichever Social Media platform or other online presence a customer or connection uses to find your business, it should always be clear to them it represents your brand. These are some examples of paths your future followers and fans may take to find you: Their friend could share one of your posts on their personal feed, see the post, then click on it, following it to your blog or another page on your website. After seeing a tweet about from you on Twitter, they could visit your profile, and then continue onto your website. When visiting your website they may click on a link to your Social Media profile to see how your company is engaging with fans and followers. 2. Make it easy to find your profile or page on Social Media It is important to follow some basic steps that will help your potential customers and business connections to find you online. Here are our recommendations for the most important tactics to do so: Feature all relevant Social Media icons in plain view on every page of your website Your website visitors should be able to find the Social Media platforms they can follow you on, quickly and easily. Link each icon to your page/profile so they can engage with you there and access more of your valuable content. The most common places to feature them is the very top of your website or in the top menu (next to the main menu links/tabs), in the sidebar, and in the footer. Put links to your Social Media profiles/pages in your email signatures and newsletters You can help your customers and other connections find you on Social Media by putting links to all of your profiles/pages in your email signatures (for employees as well), and listing them in other online communication such as email newsletters. Apply SEO practices to your Social Media profiles and pages If someone searches your brand name and the name(s) of your chosen Social Media platform(s), they should see a link to your profile or page in the search results. To make this happen, it is important to name your social profile or page (and the username if possible) the same as your brand name. Some individuals and companies assume that including keywords in the name, in addition to or instead of your brand name, is useful for search optimization, but we would advise against this. In the next blog post, we will share recommendations on how you can optimize your Social Media profiles and pages and posts, to rank higher in search results – for Google search and for the Social Media platform’s search function. 3. Engage with your Social Media followers, fans, and subscribers It should be obvious by now that it is important to post frequent updates consistently, but you should also be sharing valuable or interesting content much more often than promoting your offers. Engaging with your audience is one of the best ways of ensuring your account stays active on Social media. Here are our recommendations for engaging with your audience, and encouraging engagement from them, on Facebook and LinkedIn: How to encourage engagement on Facebook Updating Your Page on Facebook regularly It’s becoming more apparent that the reach of Facebook posts are limited when they originate from a scheduling and auto-posting application such as Hootsuite. Therefore, it is important to invest in the resources that will allow for most of your posts to be organic or added manually and originating from your page itself. Be sure to monitor your page every day to see when someone comments or shares your posts, so you can reply to them in a timeous manner. It will not give a good impression of your customer service when they comment with a question or complaint, only receiving your response a week or more thereafter. If you get into the habit of responding to comments within the same day or at the most a day thereafter, your fans and followers are more likely to return to your page and engage on future posts. Alternate the themes and types of updates you Different people find different content types/formats interesting and useful, therefore it is important to cater for everyone by regularly changing the content you post. Engage on posts and pages as your brand Search for pages that are not direct competitors of yours but cater to an audience who would be interested in your brand. Be sure to monitor
