Sunday, February 02, 2014

Brand building and social media do's and dont's

While social media is just a fun way of interacting for some people it is big business for a lot of companies. For some people it is big business because the are in the business of mining data and interpretation data so it can be used for other purposes within companies. For other companies it is one of the prime channels for exposure and brand building. While social media is relative new it has extremely quickly become of vital importance and is not something that can be ignored by a large portion of the enterprises and even small and medium businesses. One of the things to keep in mind however is that not every social media platform might be the right one for your business.

I have already shared some blogposts which tap into the differences per social media platform and also what king of content is used on which platform in the best manner to grow your brand. Recently Hassan Bawab from Magic Logix released the below infographic on the do's and dont's per social media and what it can mean for your brand exposure and building your digital marketing strategy.


To put things in a bit other fashion I have adopted the information from the infographic and included it in the below table:

Social NetworkCustomer CommunicationBrand ExposureSite TrafficSEOScore total
FacebookCentral hub for businesses to drive social interaction; Allows companies to get their messages out and obtain customer feedback.great for user news-feed engagement; business pages + parent / child updates allow you to monitor multiple locations & position brands on other pages.A top traffic source for many sites, but the viral potential is low. however, the ability to drive steady traffic to every post is consistent. Googl's external search engine traffic referrals to pages is around 34% -  Significant enough to implement SEO practices on your page. 2
TwitterAll inbound customer communications are quick and concise, which allows for simple monitoring and management of conversations.What others say about you has the real impact. The ability to retweet and interact with followers helps a brand more than any other social site. Noise and spam have reduced the ability to send direct traffic. However, it's a good tool for assisting with traffic from other sites.Singled out as a component of Google's algorithm. links are "no-follow" but the social component is real and growing with prominence.2
LinkedinNot essential, but used to engage customers by encouraging employees to answer industry-related questions in groups to become experts. Excellent for personal branding and exhibiting professional prowess. Have employees maintain their profiles to show off your solid team. Proper management of business pages and interaction in relevant groups can help drive traffic to your website.High page rank & almost guaranteed rank on first page of SERP's especially for individual employees. Great for backlinks & company goals.3
Google+Circles & communities allow you to target your messages to groups of prospective clients & customers, rather than having them generalized for entire online market.A reported 105 million unique visitors per month equates to a large possibility of exposure for your brand.Studies show that traffic from Google+ to sites that have a +1 button is 3.5x greater than traffic from Google+ to sites without the +1 button. Controversy exists of whether or not +1's affect the search rankings, but overall this network shows up high on SERP's and provides valuable backlinks as well. 4
YoutubeA powerful channel of responding to customer complaints, displaying social media savvy, and for reputation managementSecond only to facebook when people are searching a company. Be certain that the messages are frequent and consistent.growing in the traffic generation segment, particularly through in-video messaging through annotations and URL branding. Youtube is the second largest search engine on the net. It's now also tied in with G+ and videos rank well in search engines. 3
FlickrAs a PR tool it gives company-sponsored events a professional pictorial home and is more organized than facebook.Improved search rankings and integration with other social sites makes it the choice for high-quality images. Facebook is better for bulk images.Even if you get thousands of visits to a photo with your URL hyperlinked below, the click-through rats are among the lowest around. Highly indexed in search engines and passes links and page rank. It's also part of the Google and Bing's social search component. 0
InstagramProvides visual interpretation for your brand, but it is not an ideal platform for customer service issues. An interesting and engaging eye to detail can help promote your brand awareness, even in Sepia tone.Links in photo descriptions via mobile are not clickable. website address in info is, but offers little promise for site traffic. While web based instagram pages exist, the platform wil not be a cornerstone of your SEO strategy. 0
PinterestYou can showcase your company with PR related images, but this won't be the ideal promotional tool for every company.Great for businesses with high visual elements. Typically better suited for B2C as opposed to B2B.The use of proper keywords, compelling images and links can help drive traffic to your website. Links are No-Follow, and this network is more of a community. Use it with that in mind, not as a SEO tool. 1
RedditOnly the extremely adept can use it as a customer communication tool. Promoting a company to the masses with Reddit has a chance of backfiringAttempting to build your brand on Reddit is virtually impossible. It won't happen, and it's likely to turn very ugly if you try.The best social news traffic-generation site on the internet. Quality and originality are key  if a message isn't viral, it will not be approved.if you make the front page, a lot of sites will pick up your story, generating valuable back links. If not, the site is not very beneficial. -2
TumblrWith over 139 million Tumblr blogs, this platform can be excellent for communication if used correctly. The simple platform and extreme ability to have content shared on it makes it a viable branding too. Gen Y is migrating to Tumblr to share opinions. Images can get traffic, otherwise there is no real traffic potential. It may expand, but currently, almost all activity happens on Tumblr.its blogging nature allows for a high potential from a link-building perspective. The sites themselves also rank well in search engines. 1
SlideshareBetter for informational / educational purposes. however, it can be used to reply to queries about specific customer messages. The largest power point sharing community, good presentations can be equal broad exposure for your brand.With 60 million monthly visitors at a page rank of 8,130M page views, there is plenty of potential to draw people to your site. Search engines include "notes" text, so properly optimized presentations are hue. Also grate for leads and referral traffic. 3

The above information might help you in creating a social media strategy and decide on which social media you will focus the most. as you can see an additional column is added to show some sort of ranking. when developing a strategy to promote your company it is good to keep the above in mind and also take into account which target group is using which social network. If you for example are in to car parts then Pinterest might not be your first choice as this social network is dominated by women and not men who are most likely your target audience. however, if you resell fashion, then Pinterest might be very interesting to you.

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