How to Nail Social Media Without Fail by Jon Rognerud - HTML preview

Brand Awareness and Social Media Marketing

These instinctive brand associations are built through your participation and representation in social media, making them easy ways to make your brand persistent. The collective result of your social media marketing activities is that your branding message seeps into your audience unconscious.

AN EXAMPLE OF THE POWER OF BRANDING VIA THE MEDIA IS SEEN IN THE GENERAL PUBLIC IMPRESSION OF MIAMI. WHILE THE FLORIDA TOURIST BOARD PROMOTES MIAMI’S ATTRACTIVE FEATURES OF GOOD WEATHER, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE AND BEACHES, AN OPINION POLL REPORTS THAT THE POPULAR 1980’S TELEVISION SHOW “MIAMI VICE” IS USED AS THE REFERENCE POINT FOR THE IMAGE OF THE CITY⁵.

They are the images, keywords, phrases and ideas that you use to identify your business and website. These associations are important because they not only define your site but act as “triggers” for creating marketplace “buzz” and “word-of-mouth” advertising. These yardsticks measure authority by encouraging your audience to connect the dots between their interests and your website.

Generally speaking word-of-mouth advertising is called a RECOMMENDATION OR REFERRAL. These are result of keyword association to the topic and excellent content. If your domain name is directly linked to the most common keywords for your product or service, such as www.incominglinks.com, it creates a stronger word of mouth association than one that is generalized such as www.tips.com. Whatever the focus of your website, whenever this topic is discussed, you want your website mentioned in the conversation. Keyword strong and exact matching domains will typically yield faster, better results for search engines. I created www.socialmediasoftware.net – and showed up first page in Google in 48 hours for that term (“social media software”). I gained from the key phrase and the
branding/association very quickly. (Note: there is not a lot of searches for the term – yet).

This strategy reaches beyond the obvious SEO benefit of utilizing keywords to get targeted search traffic. Effectively using methods to increase your branding associations increase the instances that trigger word of mouth. Sometimes, visual devices can be used to draw up unconventional and unrelated mental associations. Icons and images used to identify your site can assist the “instant recall” of your site when similar images are seen elsewhere.

In addition to tracking a site’s growth according to its traffic, subscriber figures or revenue, your focus is on the level of concepts/keywords associations. The value of this form of branding rests in its use as a qualitative measure of your site’s position in its niche. The closer that your branding image is associated with the niche as an authority the more successful your social media marketing campaigns will be. Pay attention to the feedback about your website by tracking your brand using Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) and record the number of mentions per month.
www.SocialMention.com is FREE, quite good.