Social branding plays a very important part in providing an enterprise the recognition and authenticity it requires to succeed in the industry. Your organization’s brand image plays a major role towards driving projects and clients to you, which is why it becomes very important to consider social enterprise branding as a critical tool for your success.
Let us look at a few factors that offer the maximum results for the efforts you put in towards social branding for your organization.
Realize your Goals
The first step is to determine your goals and expectations. Understand who your targeted consumer group is. Go through demographics factors like age, gender and location of your targeted client base.
Analyze which part of the year or month, week or day offers to be most productive for your organization, and when you can attract the maximum attention from your target base. And finally realize your overall goals and expectations from your social enterprise branding efforts. This should definitely get you on track towards the right start.
Content Plays a Vital Part
Content means anything that you may use to establish your brand on the various social platforms and sites over the internet – pictures, textual content, videos, audio files, etc. Make sure you establish and maintain unique standards that define your brand, adding individuality and authority to your social presence. This may be consistent use of logos, using the right taglines and words, choosing the right colors, etc.
Staying in Touch – Follower Support
One of the most important parts of Social Enterprise Branding is staying in touch with your contacts and followers constantly. If you are being contacted by any of your subscribers / followers on your social media profiles, make sure you respond in a friendly and positive way.
This is a great way to build a strong relationship with your consumers, and it further adds a personal touch to it – turning followers and subscribers into loyal customers in the long run.
Be Present at the Right Places
Make sure you feature your organization in the correct place at the correct time. Social Media sites have mushroomed over the last couple of years. This makes it important for you to understand which of these platforms can give you the right leverage, and when is the best time to indulge in them.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are some of the most common names. Make a list of the most popular forums, blogs, websites and portals where you are likely to get the maximum exposure to your targeted audience. Make sure these sites feature businesses, enterprises and organizations of high repute. A high quality neighborhood adds a high value to your brand, and vice versa. This can help you accomplish half of your social enterprise branding mission.
Get Involved Socially
Even if this proves to be difficult, you need to get involved with your consumer base socially. This means contributing towards the community, adding value for them. Organizing competitions, events, online webinars, discussions and debates, etc. is a good way to go for this.
Sometimes charity and donation can make a big difference too, both for the community and for your organization. Planning is all that is required to make this work, and may be a bit of investment as well.
Stay Focused – and Maintain your Standards
One of the most common mistakes that you can make is lose focus. Unless you are absolutely clear about your intentions, you may divert from your primary goal. Make sure you are constantly evaluating the results of your efforts and fine-tuning them for a better impact.
Your focus should be on your targeted audience, and only them. There is no harm in attracting attention from elsewhere, as long as it does not get you off-track. For example, distributing free goodies through your social media platforms is a good idea, provided they make your targeted prospects happy.
Make sure you maintain the standards that you have set, and you meet the expected quality as well. Low quality products and cheap imitations may harm your brand image and eventually work against you.
Finally, Clarity and Transparency
Clarity and simplicity does the trick. Be transparent about your business, services, contact details and all other information that may be of interest for your followers (provided it is not classified). The more transparent you are to your audience, the more trust you will gain from them, creating a loyalty amongst them and triggering online word of mouth branding that can go viral.
These secrets have played a big role towards some of the most notable social enterprise branding success stories. It all comes down to planning, implementation, timing and analysis. Doing the right stuff at the right time and at the right pace works – just stay focused on your social branding goals!