Up until now, I have focused on providing you with the tips on developing your own individual social or personal brand.
But what about those of you who are looking to either build up your company online brand or have your authentic personal brand support your company’s social media efforts.
Here are three best practices ways for enabling an online branding system for one to support the other:
1. Determine and commit the voice of your corporate or company brand online
Just like your social brand for yourself, your company brand online needs to have a voice of authority, trust and credibility. The key is to make that voice as human as possible. There are multiple ways of doing this.
One immediate way is to leverage the voice of your personal brand with your company one. An example would be running and managing an industry topic related Tweet Chat from your company Twitter profile where your personal brand/Twitter profile moderates that conversation.
Another way is to create an internal culture of Social Customer Care around your company social brand. In this way, whoever is responsible for managing the company’s social media profiles has been trained to support customer inquiries, comments and complaints in a way that is synonymous with best practices of quality customer service and real customer engagement.
The voice of the company brand online needs to be one that is human. The conversations , commentary and content need to feel to the customer that the brand voice is similar to how they would be treated on a phone call or a meeting with your staff.
2. When developing your personal brand, assign goals of how this brand supports your company
A social brand of the individual, as I have mentioned in my previous posts, when developed and nurtured correctly can have many positive benefits, such as industry recognition, media attention and so on.
When we look at how this brand can support the company marketing goals, we need to think in more quantified ways. You should create and assign real marketing goals against the personal brand and then act upon driving personal brand influence to affect the company online brand visibility and position.
These goals can be such as: Company Brand Name visibility in organic search rank, company brand name mentions in social media, prospecting and lead generation from social relationship development, increased company profile followers and so on. Start to treat the act of social branding as a holistic marketing practice that is measurable. This will drive the best conversion.
3. When representing your personal brand, always promote your company as credibility
Once you take real action on nurturing your personal brand online, you will start to find and receive opportunities to guest blog, share insight on interviews, be on industry podcasts, and contribute to online publications and so on. Be ready to deliver your bio and upfront statements to these audiences from the angle of your company. Lead with your company title and always make mention of your company URL and social profiles.
Make sure to encourage your personal followers on social networks like LinkedIn to also follow your Company Page and give them a reason to get involved by actively engaging in your company news and social activity. Once you have a trusted personal brand, you will be able to announce company events and services to your personal connections in a way that will drive interest.
A personal brand as a marketing effort can have great positive impact towards your company marketing goals. To do so, take these three best practices at heart and begin to include them in your social branding practices. I look forward to your comments and encourage you to continue the conversation by connecting with me in social media for more social branding discussions!