To illustrate; imagine I’m a small business in the 1960’s seeking to make the public aware of its existence. I’d have to think about physical, visible signage for my premises and advertise in the classifieds. All of that costs money and would involve hiring specialist professionals to create such signage and ad copy. Fast-forward to today, and a small business director has everything they need to make their business brand known; strong and discoverable, just a few keystrokes away.

Of course this works both ways! So, just as a brand owner has some great tools and resources to reach a wider audience more quickly, so does a brand consumer have numerous outlets to transmit their dissatisfaction or voice their opinion. And rightly so; as it’s a good thing this so-called democratisation of the web allows all of us consumers to voice our opinions in an open and public forum. It can be a headache for brands however, as this unregulated, unofficial content on the web vies for attention with your own material. Now; we’re not about to advocate attempting to bury all negative publicity, it is still publicity. What we are advocating is that you seek to ‘own’ your brand message at least on page 1 of the search engines.

Why Own Page 1 for Your Brand Results?

•    Consistency of message
•    Brand recognition and reinforcement
•    Increase traffic to your owned and operated websites
•    Look like a big deal

How to Own Page 1! (It’s easier than you think).

Get Your Domain Name: Make sure you own your brand domain name. www.whatever.com and the local TLD for each market in which you operate; that is if you don’t already! Your own company website is the easiest way to own your first result.
Join Professional Directories: Add yourself to professional and local directories for your sector, thus controlling profile information and having the knock-on benefit of association.
Write and Distribute Press Releases: Writing specific and tailored news about your company is a great way to inform often, and in an official way. Distributing this news as a press release to your online press and having this covered is absolutely invaluable. Trade press publishers naturally tend to rank well due to the authority of their content.
Create a Social Media Presence: Social media is a fantastic, wide-reaching and cost-effective way of essentially, advertising your brand. Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles and CrunchBase profiles are all good ways to extend your brand message. We looked at a couple of good practise tips to be aware of, when expanding your social media brand in a previous post.
Blog and Comment: Nobody knows your business like you do. So get out there and blog, guest blog, comment on related blogs. Establish your internet credentials by showing exactly how much you do know about integrated circuits, or bridal gown design or whatever it is that you do.

Although we can’t control (nor should we want to control) what is said about our brand, but we can control what we say about our brand; so there’s really no excuse not to.

1. Be discoverable
From Facebook to YouNoodle, many social media/networking websites offer you the chance to have your content surfaced to the search engines. DO take advantage of this opportunity. Firstly this is valuable from an SEO perspective as these sites and your presence on these sites can be spidered by search bots. Such reference to your brand and links back to your site from high-volume high-credibility sites, helps improve your own PageRank. Second reason to tick that box, is that if anyone searches for your brand, they will be able to see not only your own website, but also your presence on the social media websites you have chosen. Provided you are consistent in referencing your brand (more on this in a second) this helps add validity to your organisation and faith in your brand as the user is confronted with a back-up reference to your brand from additional trusted sites. Incidentally, if your own website appears below your Facebook/Linkedin/Crunchbase profile – come see us and we’ll sort that out for you!

2. Be consistent
Your brand is your intellectual property and should be treated as such. Larger organisations tend to have entire rulebooks dedicated to their various brand identities, corporate fonts, logos and other marks. Every brand, (no matter what size) should have some basic rules in place regarding company name, logo(s) and profile. As an example – our company name is theMediaFlow (all one word, with the emphasis on Media and Flow by the use of a capital ‘M’ and ‘F’) if you search for “themediaflow” using Google, you will find a number of results on page one, including our own site, our Linkedin profile, our CrunchBase profile and various news stories about us. In nearly every case the result references “theMediaFlow”. If a result references “themediaflow” this appears to be an inconsistency, and it would be natural for a reader to place less trust in such a listing. Your social media profile is your chance to reinforce your exact brand identity, image and message in a consistent, professional and controlled way.

3. Be your own biggest fan
Unless you’re McDonalds or CocaCola (in which case, “Hi, we’d love to manage your SEM. Skype me!”) you probably can’t afford to advertise on every billboard in town and in the Corry Street ad breaks. Until that time, social media is your space to promote your business and talk about how wonderful you are, what you do and who you do it for. Do not be ashamed to big yourselves up. Never feel silly writing in the third person; and DO remember to be consistent. We find it helps to use the same profile précis as a starting point for each of our professional network profiles.

4. Be yourself
You can’t win every single deal and you can’t please every single customer 100% of the time. Each organisation has its own cultural ethos and identity. It’s what makes an organisation most distinct from competitors. Ask anyone who has just chosen a supplier what clinched the deal for them, and oftentimes they will state that “the organisation was a good fit”;” the people really understood our business,” “we got a really positive vibe from the team” etc. It is therefore important to allow some sense of your organisational values and culture to permeate your social media communications.

You will find that the technical/functional differences between networks contribute to a certain tone of voice, i.e. Twitter’s 140 character limit promotes familiarity and less formality than say a Linkedin profile; therefore trying to have the same rigid tone of voice across all your social media may seem insincere.

Please note: I’m not advocating that every brand should do their own social media communications, but a good third party social media professional should be able to communicate with your audience as an extended member of your team. They should be able to speak of “we” and “our” goals and missions; and be able to understand your business objectives, core customers and values.

We hope you found this post interesting and useful. Please do add any other pertinent points that you think we have missed that are important for growing your social media brand.