Building a brand takes effort, but you can alleviate some of that effort by using the power of social media. Indeed, this is certainly not a new advancement. Facebook, which was arguably the first web site that really started the social media revolution, was launched in 2004 and has grown to include millions of users. Twitter, launched more recently in 2006, has also become very popular amongst a broad demographic. Social media is a booming industry as well, with countless users and more being constantly added. It isn’t just Facebook and Twitter either – sites like Youtube, Linkedin, and blogging are also included.

When building a brand, the goal of marketing your products is a simple one: get your name out there in the best way possible and to the most people. You want to build trust and loyalty as well in your brand. You do not want bad publicity, negative postings, and so on. The problem that many businesses face is getting their name out there. Traditional marketing channels have been through TV, radio, billboards, and even just plain old Internet ads. The problem with these channels is that it costs a lot of money to even just get one person to view your ad. And distribution does not imply that the audience will even be watching it – many Internet ads are ignored, billboards not read and so forth.

However, people pay attention to trusted sources. These sources typically are friends, family, coworkers, and so on. As such, leveraging the power of social media allows you to let people see your company in a broad landscape. Consider your best products, your name, and your reputation as a company. Now create a cool page on Facebook. When someone comes along and “likes” your company or product, they are sending a message to their friends that they support you. Friends trust friends’ opinions and as such, they are very likely to notice that “like” and check out your company too. This can even be seen in the blogging world. By creating a cool blog that promotes your corporate interests, you can get other blogs to link to it and redirect free traffic to your site.

In this respect, social media has a strong snowball effect. You begin to promote your brand in a controlled way – with a few Facebook likes, some Twitter posts, a couple of Youtube videos, and so on. As your brand takes off though and more people begin to recognize it, their friends will also see your brand. How many times have you had a coworker or friend show you a funny or cute Youtube video? What about if that was an ad for your product? Now imagine if those ads all linked back to your web site? That would draw a tremendously high volume of traffic to your site and also increase its page rank (one of the methodologies by which Google calculates the position of the site in the search engine rankings). Getting your brand seen by as many people as possible is the goal and a funny video or an awesome page is the best way to drive people to your web site and subsequently to buy your product.

In conclusion, building your brand is in some ways much harder than it used to be because in order for social media to really work, you must provide something very unique and creative. On the other hand, when done well, social media opens doors to very cheap advertising and a certain buzz that no other advertisement method can quite achieve. For example, when Twitter lights up with news about your products that’s an excitement that no amount of TV ads can buy. Give social media advertising a try, make it link back to your site to get people to buy your products, and you’ll find quite a bit of success.

Blog by Joseph Marando - Impulse Products