Building up a brand is hard work. It takes time. It takes energy.
So if you are going to spend time, money and effort on building up your brand, shouldn’t you be focussing on YOUR brand and not somebody else’s?
What am I talking about?
Blogs and social media.
Yes, we use them and we love them. But we make sure that everyone knows who we are and where to find our online home (hint – it’s not Facebook or Twitter!)
Blogs
If you’re going to setup a blog for your business there are a lot of different options available to you.
We love using a self-hosted WordPress install. It’s easy to setup and there are literally thousands of attractive themes you can adapt to your company’s brand.
Of course some people don’t want to deal with setting up hosting and looking after their blog. We understand that.
There are other options you can use like Tumblr or Rebelmouse. Both support custom domain names, so you control your destiny more.
Not happy with the service? With your own domain name you can switch to something else. And you won’t lose all the links and reputation that you’ve built up over time.
Remember: You should try to use your own domain name all the time.
Your business blog can live in a number of locations:
yourbusiness.tld/blog (of course you could use “news” instead of “blog”)
blog.yourbusiness.tld – which is what we use
Some people like to have a completely different domain name for their blog so they use things like
yourbusinessblog.tld
BUT you should not waste your time and energy creating content to promote somebody else’s brand.
Compare:
yourbusiness.wordpress.com
vs
yourbusiness.tld/blog
Which one reinforces your brand?
Which one reinforces somebody else’s brand?
Social Media
We are strong believers in social media for business. We think it works very well and we’d always advocate that businesses engage actively with both existing customers and prospects via social.
However “social” should be part of your overall digital media strategy and branding ie. it should reinforce your existing online brand. It shouldn’t replace it.
If you have a Twitter account make sure you link to your own website.
If you’re using Facebook make sure you’re also driving people to your own site. Don’t rely on Facebook alone!
Why not?
Put simply you do not control social media sites. They change how they do things all the time.
For example, not so long ago you could share photos via Instagram to Twitter and they’d display in the timeline. Twitter and Instagram got into a spat and now you can’t.
If you post content on your Facebook page you have no guarantee that anyone will see it. And we’ve all heard the horror stories of businesses whose pages have been shutdown with little or no warning.
Sure – Facebook should be part of your strategy, but if you’re building your brand you need to build YOUR BRAND not Facebook’s or Twitter’s.
PS: Feel free to agree or disagree with me via the comments below 🙂
About the Author: Michele Neylon
