Managing your brand is hard enough offline, but now with the advent of social networking sites, the social media landscape can be a scary place for brand management. One of the most important ways to ensure you are recognized online is to have a uniform presence.
Your presence on the social media landscape shows your customers, clients, and would be clients, that you care to be where they are. Not only that, you are able to build relationships faster in a social environment than anywhere else. It is said that it takes seven (7) interactions with someone before they trust you enough to buy from you.
The more interactions you have with someone, the better it is in building your relationship. You do know that people buy things from people, right? Well let me explain how to build up your KLT (Know, Like & Trust) Factor quickly which will, in essence, help you manage your brand.
One of the biggest things you need to ensure is uniformity. Most businesses have a logo, image, saying, or if you are going to brand you, your own personal pic. Whatever it is it needs to be the same across all of your profiles. My recommendation is to use a face instead of a company logo.
Why use a person’s face instead of my logo? It’s simple, and I’ll reiterate what I said before: People buy things from people. I mean you can’t have a relationship with a slice of pizza, or a swoosh can you? No. You must remember this is a social environment.
Think of the last business meeting you went to, or seminar, whatever. Did you have a conversation with a piece of pizza? Well I hope not! Let me break it down like this:
Imagine you are at a local Chamber of Commerce after hour’s business mixer. There are people there from local businesses, networking. Who do you think would be the person that meets the most people or who gets the most contacts? A person who has a nice smiling warm face, a person who has a frowning face, or a person dressed up like a slice of pizza.
What I’m hoping you’d say is the person who has the smiling face would get the most attention. If you did, you’re right. So what I recommend to you is that the image you put on all your social profiles be a person’s face. They should be smiling and inviting. The image should say “Hi! Nice to meet you. Let’s get to know each other.”
Now the question is, whose image should you put up there? Should it be the person in your company that is going to handle the web and social media stuff? Let me ask YOU a question. Even though your web or social media person may be good at what they do, what happens if they leave the company and your presence online is now tied to their face?
The person’s face should be the owner, vice president, president, or someone who will be with the company for a very long time. It should be someone who lives the mission statement and follows the vision. They should be a leader, someone who you want to represent the company to thousands, tens of thousands… heck hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
To learn more about building your brand equity on the social media landscape, go to http://SocialBrandEquity.com. There you will discover more information on the subject of branding yourself or your business and how to save time and money secure your presence at over 50 social networking sites. Brand management is key to increasing your offline and online social brand equity.
