When it comes to making a name and building your online platform for your company, social media is a great place to build a good reputation. You have to use this powerful tool correctly, however. Anything with this much potential for reward is generally high risk. Here are some tips on how to use social media for branding purposes.
Let’s start with the number of social media sites that you choose to use. An abandoned social media site isn’t good for your image, so you don’t want to take on more than your team can handle. You want to use at least two different social media sites. Four is probably the maximum for most companies. Faceboook, Twitter, and Instagram are three of the best sites that you can use for branding right now.
Content is one of the most time consuming parts of social media. To build trust in and respect for your brand, content needs to be accurate, unique, and engaging. Avoid posting all the same pictures to Instagram and Facebook and making all your tweets your status updates on Facebook. You also want to maintain the same tone (professional, fun, excited, etc.) on all of your accounts. You can’t be super serious on Facebook, type in all caps on Twitter, and then use teenage abbreviations in your Instagram comments. You don’t want to have brand confusion for people who follow you on all three sites.
Another important use of social media is to market your business in real time. Oreos became the talk of the Internet when they capitalized on the Superbowl power outage with a relevant ad posted to Twitter. You can even try using current news stories to promote conversation. Just be careful to consider the way a breaking story may develop so that you keep your brand out of anything potentially controversial. You can’t post something on the Internet, take it down when things go wrong, and hope that no one took a screenshot.
Finally, you have to respond to comments properly. Some antagonistic comments just need to be ignored. Some are legitimate complaints and require a prompt response. This is an opportunity to show consumers, in general, how your company handles concerns. Deleting negative posts and comments is counterproductive to branding your company in a proper way. Be sure to reward your biggest supporters, and provide incentives for people to like, +1, favorite, or retweet your content.
The right use of social media can be great for the reputation of your business and helpful in building your online platform.
Additional Source: http://www.inta.org/Programs/Pages/branding2013.aspx
