Social media industry is not in its infancy anymore. Considerable social presence became instrumental for building and managing your online reputation. And now it’s time to talk about your long-term branding strategy. Do you have a solid plan for building your social authority? Just slapping a few Facebook pages and may be creating a Twitter profile or two won’t do you any good. Not anymore. It worked well not long ago, and it’s still important as a ground foundation, yet these basics are not enough.
So what is a right strategic plan to grow your social media presence?
Think about all your social activities, and keep in mind that every tweet you do, every like, every bookmark, every status update will be stored forever. Of course “forever” is a very strong word, but at least they will last more than your lifetime.
Now, let me introduce you to yourself (not a typo!)
You are a Brand
That’s right. You’re not only and individual with your own preferences and hobbies. Now you’re also a brand, whether you like it or not. You can be a magnificent and well recognized brand or you may be a weak parody on a brand. But you are a brand!
When your online reputation was mainly defined by your own websites/blogs, customer reviews and your participation in discussion forums, the possibility of your message go viral was not significant.
Now when you tweet or otherwise communicate your thoughts through social media, you never know whether your message will just sit there within your feed or will be spread all over the web by your followers and fans.
The highly increased possibility of this viral effect is the main reason why you should think about yourself as a brand.
And the stronger is your personal brand and your social authority the more likely you to succeed in any venture you choose to participate into – be it a search for new job or acquisition of new clients and customers.
Your Current Job Should Not Define Your Personal Brand
Whether you work for somebody else or you’re self-employed or you run your own company and create jobs to others, your work does not define you completely. It only reflects your current state of career.
And your career may change. You can be promoted, hired by another company or decide to start a new business.
If you haven’t thought it through from the very beginning and invested substantial resources in building your social profiles and your online presence then think about your long-term social profile.
You can change companies, and thus your own social profile shouldn’t be tightly connected with any company. Rather, it should be connected to some independent vertical – like your industry and your interests. Keep in mind though that your interests might change completely – in this case I’d recommend you to start a new profile.
Online Reputation for Your Personal Brand
Keep it cool. The online reputation for company depends on delivery of great products or services, ability to provide professional, friendly and timely customer service, ability to identify and mitigate negative responses, and many other factors.
Your online reputation depends on your online behavior. In particular, it depends on your behavior in various social media channels.
For example, if somebody is rude to you on Twitter or Facebook for no reason, your first reaction might be to flame them.
Take a deep breath. And remember that you’re a brand. Sure, you could post a response with various expletives. But is it beneficial for you in a long run?
In many cases, the social media parasite (SMP) has nothing personal against you, for him it’s just a business.
You see, if you’ve managed to build a considerable social influence and authority for your personal brand, any public responses from your account to your SMP will increase his visibility.
It’s the same principle of negative response that is successfully used by some SEO experts. Sure, anchor text in the incoming links does matter. But if an authority blog or site links to the offending blog with flaming keywords, in the eyes of search engines it’s still a link, and a very valuable one.
So even if you do decide to respond to SMP (not recommended!), do not include a link to his site in your response. Keep in mind that if you respond, you’re likely t be engaged in a long exchange of low-quality communications.
There is no value for your followers in such communications and it can only damage your personal brand.
So what should you do?
You’re not a company, and he is not a customer, so you don’t have to create a mitigation plan for negative responses. Just unfollow the SMP or if he is particularly nasty in his messages, block him.
You want to provide a lot of interesting and positive information to your followers. Help whenever you can, build relationships based on trust and expertise. And simply ignore social media wannabes who try to juggle your online reputation.
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Opening image from y0mbo on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.
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