Three efficient ways to enhance your brand through social media

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With the increasing popularity of social media in the past years, it has become an integral part of the brand identity in the market. No brand can take the risk of not including social media in their marketing plan. Driving awareness and engaging with the audience is not only a primary function anymore. In addition to this, social media now also be considered to build trust and long-lasting loyalty in the audience.  Social media has always been a playground for B2C companies. However, it doesn’t mean that B2B companies can’t leverage the power of social media to become the brand. Some of the B2B firms have already hit the gold through social media.  Optimizing social media, according to your brand values, can make a positive impact on your brand development. Being on the B2B network like LinkedIn is not enough to enhance your brand value. Engaging with the audience in the right way is also necessary for your brand reputation, as one wrong step can do drop your brand to zero as well.   The main question arises on how B2B companies can enhance their brand value through social media. Here are three efficient ways in which to enhance your brand through social media.

• Create an Online Brand Persona

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In layman words, the brand persona is a collection of personality traits, attitudes, and values that your brand showcase in the market to connect with the right audience.  According to usability.gov, “The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. These representations should be based on qualitative and quantitative user research and web analytics.”  A brand persona helps to establish trust within the audience plus helps in maintaining loyalty among your customers. For a small business, the easiest way to create the brand persona it to envision the type of audience that will be interested in your product or services and then creating a marketing message that will attract the right audience towards your brand.    With an authentic persona, one can develop trust in its audience and help to maintain loyalty as well if you are perplexed about how to create one. Not to worry, with some of the few steps, you can create an authentic brand persona. 

• Build a personality image. 
• Create an overview of your brand
• List the traits you want to highlight
• Pick out the features from the above list that can speak for your brand
• Describe how your brand will speak in public. Make sure to put an example of a script with it. 
• Describe your engaging tongue, which will help you to figure out how you engage with others. 
• Find out a style guide of fonts and colors that will go with your brand. 

If your thinking we are good without buyers persona. Then you are directing your brand without any focus. This can be harmful to your image in the market, and persona creates a connection between your brand and your target audience. If you don’t create a persona initially, then on the later stage, some out of the box personality will come, and you can’t figure out what to do with it. That will not convey the right impression of your brand. 

• Have a crisis management plan

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 A crisis can occur both online and offline, but one thing is sure that any of the crises will follow the social media route nowadays, as research shows that 80% of customers engage with brands through social media. These crises can include unhappy customers that post nasty comments on social media, delivery problems, or it can be any marketing flaw. While some of these issues can be resolved quickly, and some of them can take a shadow of crisis if the right action is not followed. This is where a crisis management plan comes into play that helps to sort out the issues at the earlier stage.  Social Media Crisis Management Plan To manage the crisis over social media can be a bit of tricky task at first. But properly managing them can be essential for your team’s success. If your stuck in between or don’t know from where to start, we have a list of components that should be included in your crisis management plan.

• Identify the source

Not every online problem or turmoil has an online origin. It can be some of the news in the media that took the face on social media. It is always beneficial to be sure about the source of the problem, which can help you to take a right step through a proper channel. If a problem occurs offline, take a look at your social media accounts and try to find is there any response related to the issue. If there isn’t one, you can expect them soon.  If the people are posting already on your timeline, look for the damage that has been made so far and try to find out trends in the posts. Before taking any action, evaluate the situation that will ensure you’re making a long term crisis plan.

• Categories the issue as problems or crisis 

Next step in handling the social media crisis to analyze the severity of the problem. You may think the problem or crisis is the same thing. However, there is a line of difference between them. A problem is a minor customer service issue that can be solved with your standard customer service tactics. On the other hand, the crisis affects a large group of people and requires an appropriate response from your side. It is important not to consider a problem as a crisis as this can pull negative attention towards your brand. Social media is a public forum, and users watch the company every time they engage. If you are not sure about the seriousness of the issue, it is always good to start with your regular customer service tactics.

• Use internal flowchart

Not every problem has the same level of acuteness. So why every problem should have the same respondent? More acute the issue is, more seniors should be respondents. Creating a flowchart should help you with who will contact the issue based on severity.

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It would be best if you did not stick to this flowchart only as it is vital to know that every problem requires a different solution. It is good to take a semantic approach, but some critical solution requires out of the box solution as well.

• Connect with media

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Connecting to prospective buyers and customers is an obvious step when marketing through social media. But you don’t have to stop there. Social media offers you more than that. In other words, to increase your brand presence, you can also connect with social media influencers, bloggers, journalists, and other active people who are making content in your niche.  By using social media, reaching out to the right audience with the right media will build a strong relationship with your audience, and you’ll be able to tap into the right market.