Benefits of Branding Over Social Media. Why, When & Where You Should Do.

Company branding is the most efficient way to show potential customers what your business is about. It is reflected visually via the logo and company design elements as well as through verbiage in marketing materials, slogans and informational copy.

According to Fast Company magazine, “The brand is a promise of the value you’ll receive.”

The idea of personal branding is relatively new. However, in the last decade the importance of personal branding has grown astronomically as new social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress and Tumblr have enable anyone to easily express themselves online.

When most of us think of brands, we think of logos, advertising and corporations. We love some brands and detest others. The reason we choose a brand is not just for the logo, but for the reputation and quality that it stands behind it. Similarly, our individual brand is created by the personal values that we believe in and how we build our reputation by our contributions to our communities, online and offline.

Uniqueness

Utilize your branding to set yourself apart from your competitors. To do this, analyze what you do best and consider your target demographic. Use graphics and word choices that clearly reflect your business to your target audience, hence your brand. Use your branding to deliver clear messages.

In today’s fast-paced world, it is more important than ever to promote recognition of a product or service. If you’re remembered as a quality provider, then you will be encouraging repeat business. Branding is a great way to promote this recognition because people are busy and tend to adhere to familiarity. If consumers recognize a brand that they have previously used and they remember being satisfied with it, then they are more likely to choose that product or service again.

There are about 3.17 billion people using the internet, and half of them are on Facebook. Each day, 500 million tweets are sent out. Every second, two new people join LinkedIn. The continued growth of social media has proven to marketers that it’s here to stay.

1. Choose networks that support your brand image.

There are literally hundreds of social networks out there, but most of them aren’t worth investing your time and energy.

Instead, find the platforms that support your brand image, taking the following factors into consideration:

1. Facebook is by the far the best platform for promoting brand awareness, as nearly three quarters of Americans adults use the site. Facebook is a great platform for promoting virtually any brand, due to its very heterogeneous user base.
2. Instagram is a great option for brands that rely heavily on images, such as clothing companies and retailers. It’s also particularly effective for reaching young adults, Hispanics and African Americans.
3. While Google+ hasn’t taken off as well as many people predicted, it can be a great platform to reach men in the technology industry, as two-thirds of the network’s users are men, most of whom work in engineering or other technical professions.
4. Pinterest is an excellent social network to reach women, especially for brands selling jewelry or clothing.
5. Finally, if you operate a business-to-business company, LinkedIn is a stronger choice for promoting business-related content and connecting with other corporate influencers.

2. Leverage influencers.

Publishing killer content to your social profiles is important, but it’s only one part of the equation. If you have a relatively unknown brand, your voice is likely getting lost in the noise. While you can eventually build your own audience through the creation of great content, this strategy is going to take time.

A much faster approach is to leverage the audiences existing influencers in your industry have already built. There are a few different ways you can do this:

• Mention their names or cite their websites in your content pieces. Influencers with Google Alerts or other notifications set up on their names will see your content after it’s published.
• Tag any influencers you’ve referenced when sharing content to your social media profiles.
• Email influencers after you’ve published your content to let them know they’ve been referenced in your work.

3. Provide valuable and shareable content.

It should go without saying, but you’ll create a much stronger brand reputation if you focus on creating useful content that viewers will want to share, rather than cranking out content to meet arbitrary publishing calendars or that covers subjects only you’d want to read.

• Figure out which content is most likely to gain visibility on your social networks. Images may resonate better with your audience than blog posts, but you won’t know that if you don’t look at your data.
• Don’t be afraid to use visual content. Articles with images receive 94 percent more views. Twitter content with images receives nearly twice as many views as text posts, even though there are seven times more text posts on Twitter.

4. Use social campaigns to promote content.

Finally, keep in mind that, in an age of diminishing organic reach, paid campaigns — especially those run through native advertising platforms — may be one of your better options for building your brand on social networks.

A growing number of brands use strategies such as contests and other social media campaigns to successfully gain visibility and generate leads.

To take advantage of this effect, provide your audience with valuable incentives that encourage user participation and make sure that your campaigns offers value to all participants.

While social media is one of the most powerful ways to reach new leads, it’s easy to waste time or alienate people if you don’t use it appropriately. That’s what makes having a sound social media strategy in place so important.

So where to begin? Here’s 10 ways to build a brand through social media.

10 Reasons Why Personal Branding Is a Requirement, Not an Option In Today’s Socially Connected World

1. Human beings buy from other human beings.
2. Delight your employees, empower them to delight your customers, audiences and social communities.
3. Social business starts from the inside out.
4. One of the most important aspects of branding is consistency.
5. You are leaving opportunity on the social table if you are not empowering your employees to shout about your brand from the mountain top.
6. You are the media.
7. Personal branding must start and be supported from the top down, and the bottom up.
8. Depending on the size of your organization, your employees are already making tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of brand impressions a day on the social networks.
9. Your personal brand is you!
10. Personal brands go with you no matter where you work, live, and play. Investing in personal branding is an investment in yourself.

Behind every branded corporate Twitter avatar, Facebook page, LinkedIn group and Instagram profile is a human being. Someone took the photo. Someone posted the photo. It was a human being who wrote the copy being tweeted or posted to Facebook.

Bottom line, human beings speak to, communicate with and buy from other human beings. Of course a brand is not a human. A logo is not a human. However, we can help make brands more human by empowering and bringing to the front the human beings within.

YOUR TURN

Social media can be a great tool to increase your online presence, but as more brands jump on the Internet bandwagon, marketing clutter can make it hard to compete. Be sure to not only use social media as a branding tool, but to use effectively inorder to stand out and keep customers engaged and interested.

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