A person’s ambition to succeed can be seen in what they do. Their reputation, and how they interact with others eventually builds a brand. People are doing this everyday online and offline. When you go to work, when you connect with a stranger in the line at the post office, and even when you are out with your family, you are working it, especially if your goal is to reach and influence people.
It takes work. It might even take money. For instance, Kitty Bradshaw had once invested $4,000 into her logo. Now she can throw parties that are sponsored by placed like GAP. As a side note, she also invested a lot of time connecting with other people through her website and social networking handles.
Although it might not cost that much for you, you might be even up doing to enough work time-wise that would equal that price.
Twitter, Facebook, and many other places are a great stage to launch your marketing campaigns, or even just connect with others. It is amazing the amount of people you can talk to within 140 characters.
In order to harness your piece of the pie, you need to sign up and get involved. That is the first and most simple step you will take toward building your brand through social networking.
Make sure you put a picture of yourself that is decent – not the ones you put on MySpace a couple years ago to try to attract a date. Your companies logo is fine, but what if you can bypass that and become the face that people come to recognize for your business rather than just any old image?
Try to connect with people in your niche as well as your target audience. For some people, this might be a wide range of people, but it is important because you could find yourself “unfollowed” quickly because you did not do your work. There are people who thought the follow game meant getting a lot of people. How will that help if the people you failed to check up are spammers and inactive accounts? How will it help if they have nothing to do with your target audience?
Do not be the spam machine! You also do not want to come out with guns blazing full of spam. You will probably focus on putting a lot of material that focuses on your niche. That is alright. However, if you are one to contact people and mass spam – you are more than likely to be reported for spam, blocked, and eventually suspended from use.
It is okay to mention your business to people, but not shove it in their face constantly.
A lot of business owners outside of the Internet do have a good relationship talking to their clients. This is no different online. Kind of hard to do business with your car and life insurance agent if you cannot at least get along with them or even trust them, right? As a customer yourself, you get a thrill when service is over the top and you feel like your business is appreciated. This is what kind of attitude you should have.
How do you use social networking to build your brand? How has it worked for you? Are there any suggestions for people still new to building their presence online?
Nice post. I have been on Facebook for a while but I don't have an account for my blog yet. It is only 3 weeks old though so I'm not too worried. I'm very new to all of this but it has been cool so far. Thanks for the info.
Thank you for stopping by. Yes, hen your site is new, you still have a lot of things you can do before building our site's fan page. It is when you are comfortable with how your site has progressed with its content and readership that should alert you that you are ready to try places like Facebook to share your content.
My blog is fairly new and doesn't use a FaceBook account. Although I do have a fan page. Do you really think building your brand on FaceBook will really help?
My recent post ThemeSheep – 3 New Upcoming Themes – Sunday May 9-10, 2010
Building your brand on ANY social network is a good idea. This is where you will share your website's content with others and bring them into what you are all about. Kind of like your website is your headquarters and each of your social networking handles (and fan pages) are your mini stores out in the community where they are exposed to potentially more people.
Does that make sense?
I would add;
If you a new to social networking, listen and observe, get a feel for the site and the way things are flowing. Much like a cocktail party, you go in and observe the set first. You would not go in and say "Hey everybody, I'm here, now buy my stuff". LOL Sounds foolish right? But there are some who seem to be comfortable with that approach, taking no time to actually build a relationship and be genuinely interested in people for who they are.
Remember, you are building a brand the moment you arrive, whether you intend to or not. People will brand you themselves if you don't provide something for them to assess. Remain in control of your own message.
Another point; be cautious about how many social networking sites you establish profiles on, You cannot be everywhere so the result will be that you may spread yourself too thin, leaving outdated profiles which reflect not so nicely on you. Take on only what you can handle. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin are the biggies these days. Be where your potential clients are.
Alright, I've used up enough of your space on my first visit. I was just talking about going in quietly was I not? LOL
Enjoyed the post!
My recent post IMAutomator – A Social Bookmarking Tool That Delivers
The problem is that there are people that put together their content and have to create a foundation to build their brand- essentially telling the search engine… "Here I am". From there, it takes connecting with others and eventually sharing information.
It is fine to listen and observe first… which I agree, but do not be timid. Jump into the stream, introduce yourself, and be eager to continue the conversation naturally. This goes to even commenting on another's blog. 😉