Don’t Let Your Brand’s Ego Kill Your Online Reputation
Your online reputation is one of the most important factors of creating a successful business.
You’ve seen egotistical brands filling up your social media timelines and feeds:
“Buy my product!”
“Follow me!”
“Read my blog!”
What these brands don’t realize is that this approach is killing their online reputation.
Every moment, we see brands who are 100% only promoting themselves. There’s no give. No sharing. There’s nothing in it for you. Only “Me, me, me!” Sometimes it’s so bad, you’re hoping the brand will be sorted as a bad egg like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Unfortunately, Facebook, Twitter, and the like have yet to design a way to tell the golden eggs from the bad ones.
Your Online Reputation Done Right
“But how will my customers buy my new product if I don’t Tweet about it?” I get asked often when revamping a client’s social media strategy. There are countless resources out there about the best time of day to tweet or how to write blog posts that gain exposure, but I want to leave you with just one major tip today: social media isn’t all about you and your brand.
Tweeting your brand on your own social media isn’t a bad thing — it’s only a bad thing if it’s all day, every day! It’s especially a bad thing if you are counting on your countless tweets to sell your products. Social media is about building and promoting your brand with a goal to drive traffic to your website.
Think about your strategic off-line search engine marketing plan. It probably includes at least one social media platform. How effective is your plan? Does it need to be reworked? Are you focusing on connecting with businesses or consumers? Who is your customer? Is there a better way to help others with your brand?
Reaching Your Target Audience
If your plan doesn’t include strategy for reaching all of your target markets, it’s broken. If you are using LinkedIn and trying to connect with individuals, not businesses, you’re probably not seeing the results that you expect.
Your online reputation marketing plan should include a complete social media plan, down to the demographics of a specific group you want to reach, how often you post, what content of others you want to share, and even what content you aren’t. If it doesn’t, or you don’t know where to begin, then hiring a social media marketing strategist might be your best bet to achieving your social media goals.
One of the worst things a reputable company can do is over-share their business, and not post often. Trends, viral images or videos, content that others write that help your customers should all be considered when building your social media plan. Remember: 80 percent of your shared content should be helpful, interesting, and engaging — and NOT advertisements for your products.
Your ego should not keep you from connecting to others. Sharing and building educational content for your followers will help to move your audience from random contacts, to leads, to clients, to brand ambassadors.
Do you feel like you keep missing out on ways to build and grow your business – especially with so much of it being online? Build a better virtual presence with the “Opting Into Opportunity” Workshop – mark your calendar for Wednesday, February 23rd and sign up today!
