Online marketing has become increasingly important in the world of business. Search engine optimization, as it was originally understood in the earlier days of the internet, focused on websites with high levels of authority linking to your own website in order to build your own authority in turn. However, as the Internet continues to develop and search algorithms become much more advanced, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that these traditional approaches are no longer as effective as they once were.
Instead, a new standard is taking place, where a link to your own site is much less important than it used to be. Now, the building of an online reputation is becoming much more focused on a mention of a particular brand – something that is positioned to reflect the more mobile-friendly nature of the Internet as more people do their Web browsing on tablets and smart phones. In the emerging world of online brand mentions, it requires a completely different approach to build the authority of a brand. Here are six highly effective tactics to improving your own company’s online brand mentions.
Increase Your Presence on Social Media
The number one location for brand mentions has quickly become social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others are the home of nearly limitless digital interactions, with individuals discussing, referencing, and commenting on your brand name. Increasing the exposure of your own brand name will increase the chances of individuals mentioning your brand in their posts on these individual platforms.
New developments in this realm, such as Twitter and Google forging partnerships, are a testament to how much social activity and brand mentions are becoming inextricably linked. A strong social media presence will encourage additional mentions, and this will soon reward you with increased traffic as a result of these increased partnerships. Additional social media platforms are likely to follow in these footsteps; while not necessarily to the same extent or with the same partners, social media platforms such as Facebook – already a powerful force to be reckoned with – have already begun to implement new features that reward original content over simple third-party links.
Building your own Personal Brand.
Businesses are not created in a vacuum. They’re the results of hard, often tireless work of business owners, their workers and, to a lesser extent, loyal fans and customers. The most important role you can play as a founder of a company is to have a strong personal brand that can then be associated with the brand of your business in turn.
Increasing your individual authority – whether as a marketer, an entrepreneur, or simply as a person – acts as a tool to base the growth of your company brand around this activity. The reach of your brand will increase significantly if you “name drop” the brand in settings such as offline mentions, guest blogs you write for other outfits, and your own personal blog as well. Meanwhile, growing your personal brand can also be done by mentioning it in the context of your business brand – one feeds into the other, which in turn provides opportunities to feed it back to the original in the future. This means that time spent growing one brand will benefit the other and vice versa.
Spend Time Outside the Internet
While it might not be as directly influential as blogging when it comes to the building of your business brand, many experts still recommend spending time outside the Internet. One of the best ways to accomplish this brand building offline would be personal appearances at conferences. Attendees at these conferences will often provide additional information about them on digital platforms, either through their own personal or business blogs or through social media mentions on Twitter or Facebook. The results are that your brand mentions have the potential to increase from several sources all at once, making it an efficient use of your time and energy.
Additionally, speaking at offline events not only holds the capacity to build your business brand but your own personal brand as well. As detailed above, this has a cumulative positive effect on both personal and business mentions that can reinforce your efforts elsewhere.
Guest Blogging
One of the more direct ways to foster your personal brand is by guest blogging. While some take a dim view to guest blogging, as it can often be interpreted as a rather less than savory way of link building, this doesn’t change the fact that savvy content marketing experts can leverage these opportunities to build personal and business brand mentions in yet another area.
In all honesty, the link is relatively irrelevant when it comes to making money. Besides, links can be omitted by editors or blog owners or simply not followed by any visitors to the site. Instead, the true benefits of guest blogging include building brand recognition by providing valuable information while helping others and also meeting needs. In the end, it’s going to be just one more place where your brand is mentioned – and that’s one more feather in your cap when it comes to building authority in the new social media Internet.
Forum Interaction
It may seem like the Internet forum is more of an old-Internet way to market your business, but the truth is that the popularity of the forum has yet to wane. The marketing potential behind forum-style platforms such as Reddit is undeniable, and other forum hybrid services like LinkedIn can provide large amounts of potential when it comes to marketing. Essentially, these forums are one of the most straightforward and effective ways to improve the number of brand mentions for either your personal or business brand. In addition, it’s not just you working on your business’ online brand mentions but anyone else who discusses them in the forum threads you create or comment on.
It’s this discussion that can truly breathe life into a brand when it comes to its online mentions and recognition. Once those search engine web crawlers notice entire conversation threads and begin to tally up just how many times your personal or business brand ends up getting mentioned, these search engines will begin to sort your business higher than it had in the past.
Provide New and Unique Content Constantly
The fundamental shift in the SEO landscape away from black hat techniques known as “link building” has most certainly necessitated the adoption of brand mentions as the newest litmus test for building authority behind your website. Now, with web browsers being able to detect link building for the spam that it is, it has become more important than ever to provide unique content legitimately.
While link building rose and fell rapidly, the idea of content creation emerged, phoenix-like, from its ashes to become one of the most valuable techniques when it comes to legitimate marketing. In the subsequent months and years, many search engine algorithm updates have come to reflect this by weighing content as increasingly important. In fact, it’s no longer an amorphous future destination when it comes to providing content instead of just static link building. It’s already proven effective in making it obvious that your business is an authoritative and trustworthy source.
Don’t be left behind when it comes to adapting to the newest and most effective techniques for building the authority of your business and its online presence. Emergent trends such as brand mentions should most certainly be adopted as soon as possible; while brand mentions are still not considered a mainstream technique today, that’s changing quite rapidly,
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