Social Media Marketing for Business

Brand perception is driven by consumer experiences with and opinions of your company. A positive brand perception gives your customers a reason to choose you over your competition. Even if your business offers a great product or service, you still need to strengthen and manage your brand perception.

But how do you do that?

One way to strengthen brand perception is utilizing social media, which helps drive customer referrals and assists in building a brand. Consumers spend more time on social media now than ever before, so why not use this tool to grow?

While some businesses believe that they have a strong understanding of how consumers perceive their brand, it may not be as accurate and comprehensive as they think.

This is where social media enters the picture.

Social media is playing a huge role in crafting brand perceptions and helping businesses build effective marketing strategies.

In McDonald’s case, they used social media to change the way people perceived their brand entirely. The fast food chain wanted to be seen as a brand that is committed to nutrition, which seems a little ridiculous, but McDonald’s used social media to change the public’s perception.

Take social beyond the marketing framework and bring it to your website. Adding social media to your site is a great way to manage and control your brand perception.

The Importance of Implementing Social Media

Social media is already an essential tool for increasing brand awareness and enhancing user engagement, but it can also be used for lead generation. By bringing social experiences to your website you are empowering your website as a critical branding tool.

A ‘socialized’ web property will:

• Help you personalize user-experience.
• Increase social referral traffic.
• Ensure users can share your content.
• Help you build deeper customer relationships.

You can see the benefit of incorporating social media on your site.

One of the simplest and most effective ways connecting your website to social media is through social login and sharing.

Social Login and Brand Perception

When you’re on a site, and the login screen has a ‘Login with Facebook’ option, that’s social login.

If you are not using a social login service on your website, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to increase user engagement. Social login makes registration easier for users by letting them log in with their preferred social network (usually Twitter or Facebook).

Using social login can improve website conversions by allowing visitors to by-pass a long registration process and the added hassle of remembering a new username and password, however, social login is not just about convenient sign-in. It can also reveal consumer behavior.

Giantnerd, an online bike retailer, was one of the first ecommerce stores to embrace social login. With sustained use, they eventually found that visitors who logged in with their social credentials were five times more likely to make purchases than shoppers with site-specific user accounts. Customers logged in through their existing social networks also spent an average of 10% more than site-specific users.

By implementing a social login on your site through a provider such as LoginRadius, you get access to actionable social data about your customers. This includes full names, birthdates, interests, friends, verified email addresses, and a whole lot more. You get deeper insights into buyer behavior, which allows you to personalize website content to give users an excellent experience. You can then analyze the profile information and interactions that took place on your site using a solution like Viafoura, which helps you track your community in real time as well as measure critical engagement metrics such as the average number of individual interactions per unique visit.

It’s important to note that just because you and I are comfortable sharing information available on our social media profiles with websites and third party apps doesn’t mean everybody else is. Recently, users have called for more robust privacy controls to be implemented on popular social media sites so that they are more in control of what information they share.

Facebook’s new privacy policies are a reflection of this. Will this impact how much information can be collected with social login, Facebook login in particular?

The simple answer is that it can.

Facebook has just rolled out an anonymous login feature. This new feature stops apps from accessing the personal data of people who log in anonymously.

For people who don’t mind sharing specific information with websites, Facebook plans to roll out a line-by-line privacy control option, which enables them to choose what information to share with apps and sites. For example, a site may be able to access a user’s birth date, but not their friends list.

The idea is to not think of these privacy changes as a limiting factor but an opportunity. Whether a user chooses to use the anonymous login feature or not depends on the degree of trust they have in site. As you keep building trust, the user might opt to share more information with you.

Social Sharing

When a user finds your content useful, it’s more likely that they will share it among their friends and followers on social media. By providing social sharing capabilities, you amplify impressions of your brand and your product.

‘Liking’ a product and sharing it on social media can even boost its value.

According to the ShareThis Return on a Share Report, whose aim was to quantify the value of online shares, the value of a positive online share at 9.5%. This increases the desirability of the product and increases the price that customers are willing to pay for it. This good news for manufacturers and retailers, because you can increase your returns based on positive shares.

So, make sure social sharing is an intrinsic part of your website’s social media implementation. Make sharing simple for the user, and they will be more likely to spread your content. Integrating social sharing widgets on your website will drive sharing and referral traffic.

Leveraging Social Helps you Maximize Brand Potential

By making your website social with a social login service and sharing, you are getting a competitive advantage. Apart from creating a positive brand perception, it also drives social media referrals to your site; the kind that is actually interested in your products and services. This will increase viable leads and boost business profitability.

Meet Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. Pratik has spoken at the 80th Annual Conference of the Florida Public Relations Association, Accounting and Finance Show, Singapore, NextBigWhat’s UnPluggd, IIT-Bombay, SMX Israel, SEMrush Meetup, MICA, IIT-Roorkee, and other major events. As a passionate SEO and content marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge in publications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web, YourStory, and Inc42, to name a few. He can be found at Twitter @DholakiyaPratik.