Last week I posted a video of Gary Vaynerchuk talking about branding. In it, Gary said “You need to build brand equity. When you have brand equity anything can happen.” He went on to talk about some of the things that people ask him, like “Which tools should I use?” Gary said, “All of them. Your user base—and the people that care about you—you need to connect to them anyway you can, everywhere you can, as often as you can. That is essential.”
I couldn’t agree more with that statement. It is imperative that you use all the tools available to you. Why? Because your users are using them. The people you are trying to reach out to are in these social communities and more and more of them are popping up every day.
It is important that your users can find you on any network they use. Creating a social brand means having a presence in every community. It means making yourself available for interaction with your user base.
I occasionally write posts on various tools you can use to leverage social media, but in today’s article, I’m going to show you how to find all of the tools you can use to reach out to your community—the tools to find the tools, so to speak. Once you find them, you can begin development using the 4 C’s.
Staking Your Claim
The first thing you need to do is locate the websites you want to use and establish your name for consistency. By this I mean claiming your username on all of the social networks. There are plenty of websites to help you accomplish this, but here are 3 of the better ones:
KnowEm
Namechk
UsernameCheck
All of these services do the same thing: check to see if your username is available on various social networks. Keeping the same name on every service makes it easier for your users to find you. Why? Let me explain.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is crucial to getting people to your website or blog. Social networks tend to do well in the search engines, especially if you’ve grown a large community. Whether you’re promoting your own personal brand or your business, SEO can be your friend. For instance:
I have been working on my personal brand for the last few years now, something I hope this blog will become a positive part of in the near future. To help build my image, I claimed my username (@stevecampbell) or something similar on a lot of social networks, even ones I don’t necessarily use. You never know which network is going to be “the next big thing”, so it’s important that you claim your username, especially if you have a common name like me. Even if I only get a handful of users following me from some of those smaller networks I’m happy because I know people can find me.
Now even though I go by Steve, I list my name as Steven J. Campbell on a lot of my social networks. This helps differentiate me a little from the other Steve Campbell’s of the world. Go ahead, do a Google search on Steven J. Campbell. A lot of the listings you will see are owned by me, and all I did was use the same name on networks I frequent. Very high-level SEO isn’t hard.
I’ll get into SEO more in the future. It’s really powerful stuff!
Conclusion
In summary, it is important that you locate all of the ways to reach your community in your niche. I’m not saying you have to spend time on every network every day, but utilize the other networks to get people to the sites you spend most of your time on.
You can use social media clients to send your message simultaneously to all of your networks, or you can post messages on your other networks telling people to check out your website or come to your Twitter page for more information. It’s up to you to be creative.
What do you think about social branding? Will you be using all of the tools to market your brand? Leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below!
Image Credit: sraburton
