It Doesn’t Pay To Rent: Build Your Brand With Your Own Social Media Site
Photo Credit: MarkMoz12
During its infancy, social media held a huge amount of promise for businesses that were looking for ways to grow their brands free of charge, all by simultaneously reaching hundreds of people or more. By being diligent, companies were able to effectively reach current and potential customers, especially if they had creative ways of going about it. Now, that’s not quite as true as it once was.
What Has Changed?
Since social media has grown so rapidly, the marketplace is over-saturated. That has meant many brands have felt it necessary to purchase sponsored advertisements and suggested posts on social media sites like Facebook in order to maintain visibility. However, if you’re involved in a business as a marketer, there’s another option. Take what you know about your audience and use it to build your own social network.
A Way to Distribute Brand Messaging
No matter how large or small your company’s exclusive social network becomes, it offers an easy and effective way to spread the message of your brand through all parts of the social network. Whether you have a message board or allow people to connect with peers who also loyally stand behind your brand, these kinds of communication channels give you chances to shape the messaging of your brand. They also reveal which facets of your brand that particularly resonate with people.
The CopyPress Community: A Social Media Case Study
CopyPress is a content creation company that established its own social media arm for its writers relatively recently. All participants must register in the system to gain full access to materials, but once they do, the social network features job postings, tutorials and ways for writers to get certifications for particular types of writing.
Of course, there’s also a networking section that could be extremely important for some users. CopyPress is a name known to many people in the freelance writing community. Although freelance writing has many perks, it can also make networking more difficult than it might be for someone who works in a more traditional role. This social network fills that void, and also offers helpful training tools for writers.
Clarify and Inform
As seen in the example above, your own social network can do more than just allow people to connect with each other. It can also educate. You could start a conversation by asking people how they use a product you sell, and start to determine whether there are certain shortcomings of your product. Then you can make changes to make the product as user-friendly as possible. Perhaps there are even instances where people are unknowingly using something in your product line incorrectly. Having your own social media site allows you to distribute helpful user guides that are much more in-depth than a simple set of product instructions, and start discussions too.
Cultivate Customer Engagement
The massive popularity of Instagram has shown how people love to get inspired by pictures. You might learn more about how members of your target audience perceive your brand by having a contest that’s centered around an open-ended prompt such as “Take a snapshot that helps describe what our brand means to you.” That allows people to get their creative juices flowing, and also provides you with insight that may help craft future marketing materials.
Hopefully all of these examples have proven how simply purchasing ad space on a social media website may not be as effective as other methods if you’re intent on connecting with your audience. Some of the main social media destinations might provide details about your customers’ habits, while laying the foundation for you to take a true ownership stake in the data that defines your target audience.
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