Last week we looked at How to Use Twitter to Increase Your Influence and today we’ll broaden the horizon by examining how to use social media to grow your corporate brand. Whether you want to attract and retain the right talent or increase the awareness of your products and services to potential clients, how your corporate brand is seen is crucial. To achieve a strong social media branding strategy, the one thing you’ll need to do is:
Grow your social audience with people who matter
It’s a two faceted approach – growing the audience and making sure they’re composed of people who matter to your company. There are 4 steps you can take to create an effective branding strategy and the good news is, they’re not all that hard to do.
1. Develop a Corporate Presence
The first step to growing your corporate brand is to have a recognizable presence on key social media channels. To make sure you get the people who matter, you have to know where they hangout – online.
Once you figure that out, you create your accounts. The accounts should be named based on who they’re representing, either one person such as the CEO or the entire company. Other things you’ll want to do is brand each page with corporate logos, use company colors and write bios which are ideally search engine optimized.
2. Understand the Social Media Numbers
Many people think that creating a brand presence on social media is just about posting frequently on individual accounts. However, there are a number of stats and figures which using the right tools are not only easy to collect but also help focus your efforts. Other than basic numbers such as how many people like/follow your company, some of the figures you’ll want to look at include:
- Peak times your followers are online
- Top keywords that interest your audience
- Demographics of your audience
- Where your audience is coming from, i.e. referral sources
A few tools which can help you get these numbers for free include Simply Measured, HootSuite and Klout.
3. Know Your Goals for Being Social
Goals for a social media corporate branding strategy need to consider how you want your organization to be seen and how a social audience can get you there. A few examples of realistic goals for any small or medium enterprise include:
- Shift recruiting efforts primarily onto social media
- Create an online presence which positively impacts all stakeholders of the company
- Create communities on Facebook, Twitter and Google+
- Ensure that at least 1 key talent has an active social media account from all functions
Before locking in your goals you’ll want to ask yourself a number of questions regarding the organization and its employees. The answer to these questions will help you determine how realistic your goals are. Ask yourself:
- Are you building a social audience to make recruitment easier?
- How important is it for you to get key talent involved in talking about your company through social media?
- Are most of your employees mature enough to understand the impact positive and negative statements can have on social channels?
4. Provide Opportunities for Employees to Get Involved on Social Media
You really can’t build a corporate brand on social media with a single person or department’s efforts. You have to engage existing employees, especially key talent. Before doing this, it’s absolutely critical that you put a Social Media Communication Policy in place. There are many examples online and it doesn’t have to be a long process – just well documented.
These 4 steps is all it takes to get a strategy in place for growing your corporate brand using social media. If you liked these steps subscribe to the blog to get more tips via email. Also, please do share any thoughts you have on the topic below!
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