12 Effective ways to do Branding through Social Media - activeight/Digital-Marketing GitHub Wiki

Social media helps do branding in various ways, as well as helps drive sales. Every business needs to do branding on social media to build awareness. Over the last 5 years, social media has completely changed the way branding is done. Marketers were used to traditional ways of branding, targeting traditional media like Print, TV, Radio, Outdoor etc. Social media has however, changed the way traditional marketers think.

Why Social Media is Important for Branding?

Social media is mostly a free online media to reach a mass audience. It has a massive reach worldwide, with over a billion users. It has reached every nook and corner of the world, with even rural areas getting hooked on to social media.

Social media marketing needs smaller budgets for branding campaigns, compared to the crores of rupees required through traditional media like TV, Radio, Outdoor, Print etc. You don’t need to spend a fixed amount on social media for brand building, as it depends solely on the budget you allocate for the campaign.

Various Social Media Marketing Platforms: Social Networking Sites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) Blogging Sites (WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, Livejournal etc.) Article Sites News Sites Press Release Sites (prlog.org, pr.com, prnewswire.com etc.) Forum Sites Review Sites Business Networking Sites (crunchbase, hotfrog, xing etc.) Viral Marketing Sites Video Networking Sites (YouTube, Veoh, Dailymotion etc.) Image Sharing Sites (Instagram, Pinterest etc.) Local Listing Sites

How to implement Social Media Marketing Campaigns Effectively?

Social Networking Sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are leading social networking sites with more than a billion active users. It is better to do organic promotions on these sites but without ignoring paid promotions. You won’t get enough traffic on your website, if you only post normal updates. You need to share informative, creative, viral, newsworthy content to keep users engaged. You can make content viral by sharing it on Google+ Communities, Facebook & LinkedIn groups.

You can also promote the brand on social networking, by investing some money on Facebook page likes, boost post campaigns, LinkedIn CPC campaigns and Twitter promoted tweet campaigns. Twitter and LinkedIn ads are more expensive than Facebook; so many brands prefer to spend on the latter. You can get a mass reach on Facebook by running a boost post and page like campaign. Some marketers run facebook contests to reach lacs of users by spending some amount. It depends on the type of content you are promoting. If you run a campaign that asks users to share and tag their friends while promoting content, then your campaign may reach large numbers. In this way branding is done on social networking sites.

Blogging and Article sites: Blogging and Article sites submissions can be done both ways: free and paid. You need to spend some money in order to get mass reach. Some articles and blogging sites have lacs of active users. If we post an article or blog on it then we can achieve amass reach. These sites also do emailers to their subscribers, which helps in branding.

News and Press Release Sites: News and Press Release Sites are also available as free and paid. You need to spend a good amount of money to reach mass audience. News and Press Release sites have lacs of users and once news is published, the content will be emailed to lacs of subscribers or users.

Business networking sites: Business networking sites allow us to make listing of business freely on popular business networking sites like crunchbase, hotfrog, google+ etc. It does help the organic ranking of the website.

Review sites: Review sites are one of the important mediums to post positive reviews of the businesses. Whenever a user doesn’t know about the product or services, he takes the help of review sites. Review sites help to make the brand popular. Once a product or service gets positive reviews, it could go viral on social media.

Viral Marketing: Viral marketing plays an important role in branding. Most brands in India resort to viral marketing for brand promotion. Recently Vogue India made a short film for Women Empowerment by featuring Deepika Padukone. The video was a bit controversial and went viral in just a week through social media. The video views reached 1 million. Viral marketing is a smart way to promote your business online.

Video Networking Sites: Video sites are the most popular sites after search engines. YouTube is the second popular search engine after Google. Dailymotion is the second popular video site in the world. Video distribution has become very popular in social media marketing. Video advertising is the cheapest advertising technique where cost per video is around Rs. 2-5. Video advertising reach purely depends on the audience you want to reach.

Image Sharing Sites: Image sharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest have more than 300 million active users. Instagram and Pinterest have become very popular social media sites for branding. Many small and medium enterprises have started promoting their brand by sharing creative, informative and newsworthy images. If you want to make your brand popular on these sites, then you should frequently share creative, informative and newsworthy content or images. It does increase your followers on social profiles.

Local Listing Sites: Local listing sites are free and can drive good traffic to your site. There are hundreds of local listing sites available online. These sites help when a user locally searches for your business. When users search locally, then the search engine prefers to display locally situated results.

Conclusion: Social media plays an important role in branding the product or services. It is more effective than traditional advertising as it can be fully controlled. Many brands in India are now running traditional advertising along with social media for branding. It helps in brand recall. If a user sees ads on TV and then again on social media, it creates a bigger impact. Social media marketing is more cost effective than traditional advertising.