Brand Consistency in Social Media
Co-ordinating your blog with other aspects of social media like Facebook and Twitter should be just like fashion co-ordination.
A mix-and-match of style, colour and texture that blends together perfectly and reflects your personality.
In a marketing sense, your personality is your brand and the different social media you employ, regardless of the combination you use them in, should always reflect your brand.
Whether yours is a commercial or personal blog, consistency is the key to creating a great, loyal community.
Know Your Brand
Your brand is your marketing fingerprint, your unique stamp on the blogsphere and beyond. Remember, in a marketing sense, your brand is your virtual personality. So, how do you want people to think of you? How do they see your blog? Thoughtful and serious? Do you want to develop a more devil-may-care personality? Perhaps, like the class clown, you want to be all about fun. Or, if you've got a penny pinching blog, you might want your brand to project you as a money-saving guru.
Whatever your brand, once you have established it, you're pretty well stuck with it - trying to change brands mid-stream is a difficult exercise. You would be asking people to change an ingrained mindset, and you risk losing credibility by jumping from one position to another. So, think carefully about your brand and how you want to be perceived now, and in the long-term.
Expressing Your Virtual Personality
Once you've decided on your brand, you have a multitude of social media options to express that virtual personality. Some media are better suited to certain brand types. A high-action brand could be seen at its most dynamic in the moving medium of YouTube or Twitter. Consider uploading a fun and informative video piece to YouTube - you can even include an ad for your blog, product or service from time to time. A creative brand might find a more receptive audience on MySpace and find new and varied fans through Stumble Upon or Digg. Brands that rely on constant communication to convey information e.g. free offers or daily deals could look to Twitter.
Facebook is the ideal medium for establishing a more intimate relationship between brand and reader, with the ability to upload photos and personal information. Facebook offers you not only a rich array of branding, sales and communicating options (applications, groups, blog networks, fan pages, sharing, e-commerce tabs) but also rudimentary back end marketing reports using the notoriously free and easy user information available. Remember though, set up a "page" for your business, not a "profile" or you risk being deleted without warning!
Of course, a combination of all of these options is viable - just as long as you maintain a consistent brand personality throughout all media and take the time to do it right. The biggest mistake businesses make is going gung ho into every aspect of social media and then finding Community Management too time consuming and giving up the lot.
Setting up your Tweets to feed into your Facebook page and adding the same core content to all media can help save time but if your audiences are different from one medium to the next, make sure you are always speaking to them!
Engage, Don't Sell
You have the brand. You've decided which social media to use. Now, use it wisely! Try and resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell. Make your tweets or Facebook uploads engaging rather than exercises in selling. By doing this, your uploads and tweets are seen as more than spam. If you are talking to an audience that loves good deals, keep your finger on the world wide button for great deals to share with them - take the work out of it for them and they'll be loyal and eager to listen when you do sell.
Don't be afraid to post photos and videos to your social media as these are the items that get shared and re-tweeted.
By engaging your market and creating a community around your brand, you are creating that emotional attachment that business has spent billions trying to create in broadcast advertising. You're sharing a strong and binding feeling with just the right people, and the best way to do that is consistency.
Your Turn: Branding for Bloggers
With all of the noise and competition in the blogosphere, and with bloggers trying to find some elbow room in a crowded niche, how important is brand consistency with blogging? Do you pay any attention to it?
Image Credit: Special KRB
- Susan Long
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