How active are you on the social networks?

How active are you on the social networks? Do you truly use their power and influence to boost your business. If you don’t use them then you could be leaving a lot of good business on the table. For those companies who do utilize social networks, they have learned to tap into this rich seam of information that can drive their products to better meet consumers’ expectations.

Consumers today increasingly rely on social communities to help shape their thoughts and decision making process. Yet most companies have not made social media a priority. Given the explosion of this popular medium, marketers should leverage it as a means for brand name authority management.

Inherently viral, social media sites are highly active online communities with engaged and passionate users. And while a good deal of the content that resides on them might be considered favourable, an equal amount if not more is exactly the opposite.

Naturally, the appearance of such negative content on these sites is anything but helpful to a brand’s reputation, and even more so when it surfaces in the search results.

Fortunately though, social media isn’t a one-way venue for consumers only; marketers can also enter the conversation.  By engaging with the user community, marketers not only gain a voice in the platform, they also gain the ear of the consumer and have the opportunity to repair any damage, re-gain consumer trust, and build upon that relationship.

Capitalize on social media by ….

Dedicate resources and manpower to consistently engage social media platforms. Staying on top of your brand perception is essential. You need to have sufficient resources to engage social media platforms as the content on such sites is constantly updated.

Determine which social media platforms are important to your business.  Know whether your target market engages (FaceBook, MySpace, Yelp, etc.) this will help your brand reach the consumers that care about your business. Using a third-party research tool like com Score, brands can gather and compare demographic information for their website against those of social media websites. This allows the brand to validate which social media platform is currently attracting its target audience.

Evaluate your brand image within those platforms.  A good place to start is by performing a search for the keyword phrases and websites that are impacting your brand image the most.

Address negative content; generate content to reinforce a positive brand image. These actions will help you combat any untruths about your brand, and provide alternative content for the search engine bots to index.

Create an official YouTube channel for video content. YouTube videos are easily accessible, they rank well in SERPs, and they can spread virally.  On top of that, video content is easy to create.

Communicate and engage with users regularly. The goal should be to become the authority on your brand, and ideally, your industry. But that won’t happen if your participation is infrequent or wasteful. You need to regularly join the conversation and truly engage.

Be proactive. The best way to get users to become more engaged is by constantly generating new content. Doing so will also provide more content for the bots to index.

Tapping into social media provides marketers with great insight and opportunity.  Smart marketers will start leveraging it today as a great tool for brand reputation management.

 @ Web-Work At Home

Twitter * FaceBook  * MyBlogLog  * Technorati  * FriendFeed