Today we’ll be featured on News Channel 5 with Dr. Friday. Here is a quick outline of our short interview. Video to come soon.

Social Media and Branding

What is branding, and how important is it to a growing a successful business?

First off, branding started off as a term used by cattle farmers for a process in differentiating their cattle from other farmers cattle by placing a unique mark or symbol on the cow’s hide. Over the years, the term branding entered the marketing world and is used to differentiate one companies products and services from their competitors.

Branding is essential to all business in the fact that it creates unique characteristics of a company that its customers will remember and will drive future purchase decisions. So branding starts as a company name, logo and tagline and slowly evolves over the life of the company into a promise of quality.

Many small businesses have little to no money for marketing, is social networking a way for them to grow their business

Absolutely. Social networking is a great cost effective tool that companies can use to help build their customer base. Many social networking websites are free to use and I’m sure you know of the major sites out there such as facebook and twitter. Managing multiple accounts can be time consuming, so there is also tools out there such as HootSuite to merge all your update feeds into a single interface.

The key to using social networking effectively as a business, is to remember that you are talking to individual people, not other businesses. When I first start helping many of my clients that are testing social networking, I find that many of them are “constantly selling”. The bottom line is, people dont want to be sold to every day and are looking for a more personal approach. So businesses want to include personal updates, ideas and opinions as well to connect on a closer level to their customers.

Does every business need branding?

Sure, just by starting a business, a company begins branding. The goal is to maintain a quality product or service, and give it appealing characteristics to your specific audience. That will ensure they remember you when the time comes to make a purchase decision.

Blogging and twittering is terms we keep hearing about but how do you get people to follow you?

Getting people to follow seems difficult, but in actuality is very easy. One easy way is to follow others that are in your interest area, read their blogs and write interesting comments on them. By doing this, other bloggers out there will begin to read your blog and follow you. Another great way to get followers is to just create unique and interesting content. By doing this, your search engine rankings will rise, more people will find you, and you’ll naturally gain more followers.

So follow us. We’ll follow you and offer free tips on how to naturally increase your search rankings and get more traffic to your website.