Thanks to the rise of social media, building your business brand has never been easier or more cost-effective. Using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to position and promote your brand has the potential to achieve maximum exposure for minimum investment.
However, it’s also crucial to understand how effectively each site reaches users, as a misstep can mean wasted opportunity and lost business.
Take Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for example. All three support business brand pages, and each is perfectly suitable to fuel your social media strategy. But you must approach each one differently if you want to get the most out of the individual networks.
Here’s a breakdown of the relative advantages and disadvantages of each platform, based on recent trends and user habits:
- Facebook: A recent study of 2,000 U.S.-based Internet users revealed that 85 percent have Facebook accounts, 74 percent use Facebook every day and 57 percent have 100 or more Facebook friends. These numbers were superior to Twitter’s in every way. However, this reach is a double-edged sword of sorts. It means that you have to be extremely careful to stay on top of your Facebook communications and act very quickly to put out any fires that start, as negative word can spread like wildfire.
- Twitter: It is generally held that Twitter offers the best business brand landing pages of the three social media marketing heavyweights. Its recent redesign supports enhanced features including attention-grabbing headers; support of images, graphics and logos; and easier management of recent or important tweets. However, additional changes are planned for slow rollouts, so be sure to be active and aggressive in promoting your business brand on the site through regular tweeting, rather than relying on the new landing pages to do all of the work for you.
- Google+: One of the most attractive features of Google+ is ease of use. Its business branding pages are very easy to design and implement, and generally don’t require professional help or advanced technical knowledge. You can also backlink to your company website from your Google+ business page, which theoretically gives your search engine ranking a boost. However, Google+ doesn’t allow promotions or contests to be released across its network, and its status as a newcomer means its reach is relatively limited - and future uncertain.
The use of social media in business branding is still in its infancy, and best practices are constantly changing as this niche continues to evolve rapidly. Here at Social Strategy1, we specialize in helping business owners like you harness the incredible power of social media to find and exploit profitable branding opportunities. We provide a wide range of proven solutions that are helping entrepreneurs across the country take full advantage of the myriad opportunities provided by social media technology.