Social media for small business - marketing your brand online

Investing in your brand online isn’t just about spending money, it’s about building a presence that will resound with your customers, and keep them coming back time and again.Building your brand online will not only help build awareness and help raise your reputation, People will become invested in it and remain loyal to your brand.Some tips to help build your brand online:Don’t put your eggs on in one basket. It pays to build your brand through multiple channels. From an organic search perspective, make sure that your brand name and messaging is consistent in your title tags and in your meta descriptions. It’s important to also ensure that your messaging is consistent with your brand voice throughout the various channels you chose to use. By creating and being consistent with your messaging, will mean that consumers will be able to readily recognise and recall your brand. This has the potential to make you stand out when customers are ready to make an enquiry or purchase.Plan for social media integration. As part of your strategy to bring and build your brand online, you need to know what you want your brand to say or do. How do you want to interact with your market and how do you want it to respond?Look first at some of the tools available to help build your brand online, you need to know what is right for you – Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? LinkedIn? What about other niche blogs and forums? Determining what is right for you may take time and research to identify who and where your audience is.  It’s important to look and listen to what people are saying about you and your brand; chances are people are already talking about you even if you haven’t got a presence on these social media channels. If people aren’t talking – start conversations yourself. Look for people are talking about that relates to your business type and join in. It’s important to understand that interaction does not mean pushing yourself on people - be conversational. Treat online reputation building as networking. There’s not much difference between traditional networking events to networking online. They’re both about building your reputation.Tapping into your offline contacts can help with building your online reputatio. Some of these contacts are likely to already be using online strategies of their own; with the right approach they will likely help you.Many people using online tools are willing to ‘introduce’ you to their contacts, they could mention you and show links to your website, which will also enhance your search presence. Plan how your brand will speak. Determine how and what your audience wants to hear; mostly this will come through your initial social media activity. This will form the basis of your brand’s online tone.In working on what your online voice will sound like, it’s important to:

• Speak with your audience, not at them - it doesn’t and shouldn’t always be about business.
• Be consistent with the way you talk online; Be conversational;
• People do business with people - have a personality for your brand.