Including Social Media in Your Branding

The word is out! Social media is a key component to branding yourself online. Have you incorporated social media into your branding plan? Do you have an online reputation management plan in place to manage your branding online? These are some of the questions I will answer in this blog post.

Image: SXC.hu

According to Duct Tape Marketing, social media is defined as “… the use of technology combined with social interaction to create or co-create value” is important to growing your business online. There are many books and website sharing how you can successfully implement social media as part of your online planning. Just keep in mind that it is not an overnight success factor and that you do need to put in time and effort.

To include social media in your online business branding, you should include time spent researching what you need to do to brand your business. While researching what you need to do to brand your business online, keep the following things in mind:

• Determine who your competitors are and make note what they are doing to brand themselves. I’m not suggesting that you copy their efforts at all. Just make note and allow their efforts to stir up your creative juices.
• Be open to using different and creative ways of branding yourself. Such as when you see the golden arches; you know that there is a McDonald’s store nearby. Or when you see the Nike swoosh logo then you know that it is a Nike product. Make sure your logo and branding is uniquely yours.
• If you are new to social media, include in your branding plan time spent learning about the best ways to incorporate social media to your plan. Otherwise, try not to overwhelm yourself with trying to participate in every social media website. Research and see what’s best for your business branding and then create a plan on how your will participate in social media. If you need to hire a social media Virtual Assistant (VA) then it would be a good idea to do that. It will free up your time.
• Use your logo whenever possible so that people can get use to associating it with you when you participate in social media.

These are just some of the ways that you can incorporate social media into your branding.