Does your business have a Facebook or Twitter account. How effective are they in boosting the image of your company? Are they leaving a positive impression on audiences?
Brands are not created overnight—they are nurtured. And nurturing starts in one of the most effective global channels: social media. To increase awareness of your brand, you need to decide what platform to use, how to approach audiences, and what impact to leave.
5 Techniques to Stir Social Media Buzz for Your Brand
1. Build your online reputation
When someone goes to Google to search for your brand name, your website should appear on the first page of the search results. Or better yet, your business should dominate the top sections of the first page.
This is ideal if your company name is common; you need to own those pages by making sure you have an account everywhere.
How?
The first thing you must do is slowly establish your reputation online. Use various social media channels and maintain a consistent brand image in these platforms.
For example, use the same display name and profile picture for all your accounts. This way, even when you use different portals to reach your clients, they will easily recognise your company and be familiar with your products or services.
In a gist, create a stronger online presence and use social media to dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Be the trendsetter
What most Tweeps (Twitter users) do after logging in to their accounts is check for trending topics. They click on these, view the tweets, and share a tweet or two of their own, including of course a hashtag.
As a businessperson, you can use this to your advantage by starting the trend yourself. Granted, this may not be as easy as it looks, unless you are Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga.
But to start off, you can join trending conversations by tweeting about it. Then, you can initiate your own trend by finding an interesting topic that relates to your niche.
You can also include photos, videos, or links to your website which you think people may be interested in. Just make sure that you do not abuse this by tweeting five posts every hour. Otherwise, this will make you lose your followers and thus lessen the tendency of your topics going viral.
3. Interact with other social media users
The best way to promote your brand online is to have a stable relationship with your customers and fanbase.
Your friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, circles on Google+, and so on—you should have constant interaction with these people.
Specifically, encourage them to give you feedback or suggestions regarding a product or service. And if they tweet or upload a photo concerning your business, re-tweet or share that to your fans.
But do not just stop there. In fact, you can use those tweets or posts and make a “success story” for your enterprise, which of course you will share to your fanbase. People are more interested in seeing real-time reviews about a product rather than the manufacturer of the product.
4. Diversify your content
When we say content, it does not only refer to written posts; it also includes photos or videos.
But is regular posting enough to gain attention to your brand? The answer is no.
Social media trends change rapidly. At first people were interested in Pet Society, then they got bored and moved on to Farmville, then they stopped playing Facebook Games altogether.
For you to keep up with the trends, you have to constantly change the way you use your social media accounts. Even if you noticed a positive report on your analytics, you still have to evolve and adapt to the changes in the online community.
For example, do not just continually post clients reviews on your Facebook Timeline. Photos, videos, links, funny stories, or clever quips may also be good for your image.
5. Use Humor
Ever head of 9gag? Of course you have.
This clever social media image-based website centres on humorous posts coined as “gags”.
If you use sites like these to reach out to a wider scope of audience, you have to avoid outright advertisements. Also, what you consider humorous may not be funny to some people, so you should take extra care in your posts.
But in the first place, how do you create a post?
You are going to need an Adobe Photoshop and some imaginative, if not sarcastic, thinking. Then, consider what your brand is and how people respond to it. You can even conduct a forum or a survey to test how your clients view humour and if it is in synch with yours.
After that, you can create an image by combining different photos, even memes, to create an original and funny post.
Of course, since this is a subtle and clever form of advertisement, you should make sure that your brand is involved in some way.
Wrap Up
Of course, there are hundreds of other strategies on how you can successfully use social media channels to promote your brand. These are just some of the methods I have tried and found effective.
If you want to share your own, I’d be happy to read about them in the comments section.
Guest Post by Emma Tomlinson :
Emma Tomlinson is the Head of Retail at Smart Traffic, a pay on results SEO company listed at the Top 10 of the Microsoft Tech Track 100 for 2011.