The success of your social media and branding efforts is centered around your brand. As a brand, your visual presence should be consistent throughout all social media platforms. Visual branding allows customers to connect with your brand at all times and builds brand loyalty. To this end, you want to ensure all images represent your brand effectively. Using an image from your social media marketing agency such as Google+ or Facebook as an avatar for your profile page, or optimizing your website content for optimal visual branding can create a tremendous impact for your business.
The power of visual branding is not something to take lightly. Creating brand consistency requires careful coordination between your business brand and your social media and branding efforts. The key to developing successful brand strategies is ensuring that your brand imagery is consistent across all mediums, including, but not limited to, social media and social networking. A strong visual identity speaks a thousand words; consistency in visuals is a must in social media and branding. There are many ways to brand yourself and your company through visual methods such as online marketing and SEO.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential for success in the realm of internet marketing and the integration of SEO and social media marketing is vital to consumer engagement. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter are just some of the social media outlets that can be used for effective branding and optimization. While SEO can help you rank better in the search engines, the foundation of any successful strategy is building relevant backlinks and increasing rank. YouTube is considered by many to be one of the most powerful social media outlets, so optimizing your YouTube videos for SEO purposes can have a profound impact on your marketing efforts.
Social media optimization is not just about building links and making your presence known, but rather developing a relationship with your customers. Branding involves building trust with your target audience and it is this relationship that will drive consumer behavior and ultimately increase your sales. It is also necessary to understand the differences between social media and branding before considering using either method for your marketing efforts. While social media may be considered part of the branding process, it is important to separate the two and consider the goals of each method before investing time and effort into either.
Using the colors blue and yellow has been seen to have an impact on both Google PageRank and Facebook branding. Blue has been seen as a calming color and can be seen in the Facebook branding of organizations such as the Red Cross, UN, Nike, and Harvard. Whilst, the color yellow has been associated with activity, excitement, and energy and has been seen in examples such as Rolling Stone Magazine. Whilst, studies have shown a negative impact on brand perception when using red, blue, or yellow, these colors can be used to enhance other elements of your website or blog. One reason for using blue and yellow colors in conjunction with social media and branding is that these are colors that are recognized as being positive in nature.
So, whilst social media and branding may not appear to be closely related, the ways in which these methods impact your websites and blogs are very different and one of the major advantages of using social media and branding is that they work in synergy with one another. Your goal is to build trust with your audience, create awareness and then turn this into increased sales. However, it is vital that you remember branding and social media do not need to be directly linked, you can use one to compliment the other.
