In the past, entrepreneurs promoted their brands and products using print, radio, and TV advertising. Today, businessmen are leveraging the internet for advertising purposes. The most successful of them are often one and the same with those who keep up with the continually changing landscape that is online marketing. To truly become effective in online marketing, a company has to know how to improve its online reputation by taking advantage of the power of social media.
Online reputation management is an integral part of any business’ marketing strategy. Reputation management specialists employ many techniques to ensure that a company has a clean, strong online reputation. One of these techniques includes using social media as a brand-building tool.
Social media provides companies with a way to communicate with millions of potential customers who go online every day. Among the most visited and influential social media platforms are Facebook and Twitter. It is no longer debatable that companies must utilize the power of these two sites and leverage it to their advantage.
Using Facebook
Businesses can advertise by creating their own “like” pages on Facebook. Many large corporations, such as Coca-Cola, Target, and McDonald’s, use Facebook to further enhance their online presence and interact with its hundreds of millions of members. Facebook even kicked it up a notch by introducing Graph Search, which they say will “make it easier for people to discover your page and learn more about your business.”
Using Twitter
Marketing on Twitter is also a great way to build a company’s brand and market its products and services. Through Twitter, businesses can connect with their target audiences through the use of hashtags, and they can even measure the effects of their marketing efforts with sophisticated analytics. Businessmen and social media experts alike value the influence of Twitter. Jill Duffy of PCMag adds, “If your business is not part of this exchange, you’re leaving two huge opportunities untouched – growing your business and improving it.”
Setting up a Facebook and Twitter page is a good way to start building up your company’s online presence. However, maintaining several social media profiles all at once can take up a lot of time and energy – a page must be updated regularly, and customer queries must be answered immediately. But these problems can be mitigated easily if you have the right tools and enough of the right people.