3 Reasons to Actively Manage Your Brand In A Social Media Era
If you are not actively managing your brand, your sales could be impacted because current and potential customers are seeking ways to engage with your brand. In the era of Social Media, opportunities to connect with your customers are more abundant and properly managing your brand is critical to your success.
- Your Community
Customers—past, current and potential- want to form authentic relationships beyond transactional interactions. Leverage your community by providing advice, recommendations, tips and any relevant knowledge that can add value and position you as an expert. Understand why giving more value is providing the best customer service, the right thing to do and establishes essential characteristics of your brand.
Social media is an amazing platform to share content that engages your community and keeps your brand top of mind. Your content should be centered around the customer, not your products and services. Striking a balance of service, sales and promotion should be understood and fundamental for your brand.
- Establish Your Online Presence
Determine what you want for your brand online. Do you want to drive traffic to your website or to your physical property? Do you want to use social media for your brand? Are you interested in driving brand awareness to let your customers know you exist or are you interested in generating leads, managing customers, or having an online presence because everyone else does?
If you have an online presence, your brand should be on the first page of Google if someone searches for your business. Your brand’s presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever social media platforms you should be part of your search results. Creating and managing your social media profiles using your brand name allows you to take more ownership of how your brand is managed online, control conversations about your brand, interact with your audience online and respond to customer inquires and feedback.
If you don’t have an online presence, you are missing an opportunity to engage with your audience.
- Be Human
Customers expect brands to be responsive and transparent. Customers buy into you before they buy into your brand. Your brand’s personality should be felt in all customer interactions. Ensure you are brand message is consistent in all interactions. Also, responding to customers has always been important and is even more critical in a social media era. Customers don’t expect brands to be perfect; however, they do expect brands to have compassion which means developing and nurturing relationships is essential for survival.