What’s in a name? – William Shakespeare

A brand is after all just a name, so why so much fuss over branding? The simple reason to adopt branding is that it allows you to stand out in the crowd and helps your business/ product to make its presence felt. There are numerous ways of branding yourself and social media is one of them.

Be it blogs, wikis or social networks, most social media channels offer a great window of opportunity for effective branding. Social media offers the following advantages as compared to cotemporary branding.

• Virtually Free
• Wide Audience Base
• Comprehensive Multimedia support
• Massive untapped potential

In this post, I walk you through the five most effective ways of using social media for branding.

1) Facebook Fan Page

IMO, Facebook Fan Pages are amongst the best social media tools for branding simply because it has amazing potential to build a great fan-following for your business. There’s no other social network in the world with nearly 400 million active users, 5 billion pieces of content, 3 million active pages and almost 20 million users becoming fans of Pages each day.

Yeah, you read that right – a whopping 20 million people getting associated with a brand (be it an individual or a business) every 24 hours. Need I say more?

2) Twitter

What can 140 characters of text do to establish your brand? A lot! Twitter is a great brand for building a reputation. You can reach out to millions of prospect customers with a few twitter clicks. I’ve always maintained that twitter has a distinct advantage amongst all social networks – ubiquitous access. You can access twitter from your computer, your phone – from the twitter website or through any of the thousands apps available for twitter.

Twitter allows you to start conversations with like minded peers/ prospects, share valuable news and information, build your audience, stay connected with latest events and finally build and monitor your own brand/ reputation.

3) YouTube

Most customers like to see brands in action rather than go by word of mouth. YouTube offers a great way where you can show videos of how your brand works and how you’re superior than your competitors.

Create your own branded channel on YouTube and see the world of difference that it makes to your online audience.

4) Blog

I love to read about a brand before I get associated with it. In today’s modern age, many consumers think alike and are keen to spend some time reading about brands before they commit to them.

A blog is a great place to showcase your brand. Coupled with SEO and smart tags, blogs are a great way to establish your brand online. Blogs help spread brand-awareness as well as serve as a great medium to educate users about the details of a brand/ business.

5) StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon offers a great way for users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It’s an inherent part of human nature to look for recommendations/ advice from others before we take decisions.

StumbleUpon offers a personalized recommendation service which can do wonders to the fortune of a brand. It helps your site’s traffic quantitatively (more visitors) and qualitatively – positive reviews and recommendations help establish your brand.

There are several other social media tools which work well for online branding. However, I believe that the five tools I mentioned above have the maximum impact and reach for most brands. What do you say?