Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11

Engaging Your Brand Audience Online with Social Media

In This Chapter

Mapping and navigating the social-media landscape

Developing and sharing content that pulls people to your brand

Leveraging blogs, video, and presentations into online engagement and interaction

Social media is where your brand goes to interact with its online audience. It’s also where your customers and fans introduce your brand to their friends and followers through their comments, likes, posts, retweets, and more. Their actions make transmission of your brand message a customer-generated action that builds both your reach and credibility.

On social media you can share information, make friends, generate leads, develop followings, and post content that pulls people to your point of purchase, whether that place opens from a front door or a home page.

The downside is that social media is also where your brand can get beat up. When brand builders forget that social media is, first and above all, social — when they jump over the sharing and interacting steps to start pitching and selling — they lose not only their audience but also their likeability. Worse, when brands lose a grip on their brand message, ...