Everyone relies on social media these days. Many personal accounts were created to connect with long lost friends and family members who are geographically far away.
Businesses also aim to connect with customers to increase the reach of their brand. It’s a good thing to have a strong social media presence as part of your online marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t be all that you have going for your business. It’s good as a starting point, but when everything relies on social media, you’re leaving room for problems in other platforms.
Unavailable Handle
If your business has a thriving social media presence on Facebook, you probably use the name of your brand to make it recognizable for customers. You could have been concentrating on Facebook so much that you didn’t realize that someone else was already using your handle on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms.
When you finally focus on a well-rounded online marketing strategy, you can’t do it without resorting to an inconsistent handle name across platforms. You may even need to buy the handle from the person who was using it, just to protect your brand.
If it’s online marketing for franchises, it’s easy for a person to predict the kind of handle you’ll use if they look at how the franchisor’s handle is structured. You can link to the correct handle through your other accounts, but customers may still feel lost if they’re trying to find your business intuitively.
Branded Keywords Ranking for Competing Brands
It sounds like a vile move, but in the world of paid advertising, all keywords are fair game. That means the branded keywords you weren’t targeting may be directing traffic to your competitors. You may need to spend more to target these keywords at a later date. The more logical move is to add them to your keywords list as early as possible.
If you’re working with an SEO company, they will probably recommend this for your campaign, and there’s no reason for you to disagree. Even if you assume your brand name is unique enough, if the wrong people use it to their advantage, they may ruin your SEO efforts completely.
Your Reputation is on the Line
First, your handle. Then, your brand keywords. Your problems don’t end there if you concentrate on social media just because it’s mostly free marketing. An impostor might be pretending to be your business and claiming your listings on your behalf. That won’t be a problem if they’re a good business and are improving your reputation, but that’s hardly the case. Chances are, your business will be known for inconsistent information and damaging services.
It’s a blow to your reputation if potential clients can’t contact you because the wrong details are on site listings you haven’t claimed. It’s even worse if a different business is blatantly pretending to be you to offer low-quality services. They might even have a website all set up with fake details!
It’s good to have your social media all set up as part of your online marketing strategy. Relying on it completely, however, is not enough and leaves holes for problems that might be expensive to correct later on.