In our recent post, “Clean Energy and Social Media: A Perfect Marketing Fit“, we mentioned the importance of creating and maintaining your brand image. Let’s get into some greater detail on how use social media to build and grow your brand image as a clean energy company.
About Brand Imaging
Before we begin, it’s important to have a clear understanding of just what a brand image is. Here’s the short definition:
The consumer’s impression of a company’s qualities and shortcomings.
These qualities and shortcomings can be real or imaginary – it doesn’t really matter because people’s perception is their reality. What does matter is that you can impact those perceptions in a positive way through social media. Here’s how:
Minimize Promotion
When using social media as a marketing tool, always be mindful of the fact that people use it to improve their lives in some way. What that “way” is differs from one person to the next. But one thing is certain: People don’t use social media to be bombarded with advertising from their social media contacts, friends, and followers.
So the first rule in brand imaging on social media is to avoid the excessive use of purely promotional material. How much is permissible? Generally speaking, if you’re posting on social media daily, you could safely post a promotional message once a month. But you don’t really need to even do that. Instead…
Become a Content Machine
The second rule of brand imaging on social media is to frequently publish relevant, shareable content about clean energy and related topics. How frequently? Once per day, at a minimum. You’re probably clenching your jaw right now thinking; “I don’t have time to create one or more pieces of content a day!” Relax… I’m not suggesting you do that. What I am suggesting is that you engage in some content curation.
Content curation is the practice of finding online content that someone else has published, and share a link to that content with your social media followers. Of course, you don’t just share the link. You include a brief comment with your own thoughts about the topic being covered in the content. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of extra minutes to do this. After all, you already spend time reading to keep up with the industry, right? Investing a few minutes sharing some of what you’ve read is time well spent.
Sharing You
Of course, it’s not advisable to only publish curated content. To maximize the effectiveness of your social media branding efforts, you should also share some of your own content. You may already be publishing content on a company blog or other theme-based web pages. To use this content as a branding tool, simply share a link to these articles on your social media outlets. Of course, your accompanying comments should be limited to a brief summary of what the article you’re linking to is about.
The Cumulative Effect
Remember our short definition of brand image? Well, all of this non-promotional content serves to build your reputation and credibility as an expert in the field of clean energy. In other words, you’ve enhanced the consumer’s impression of your company’s qualities and, over time, diminished or eliminated any perceived shortcomings.
And remember when I said you wouldn’t even need to publish promotional content? By positioning your company as an expert in clean energy, yours will be the first company your social media followers think of when they’re in need of a clean energy solution.
Everybody wins.
If you’d like to learn more about how to create your brand image as a clean energy company, or you need help with other aspects of your marketing strategy, contact us online or call 408-529-8325.