One of the best things about creating a social media campaign is its effectiveness in branding. But for how great it can be, many marketers miss a number of great opportunities and never take full advantage of the branding potential.
The issue arises from the fact that social media sites require a minimum of co-branding. When your content and consumers are interacting with you on Facebook or Twitter, you lose some level of branding to the respective social media site.
For larger brands, this can be a major issue – especially when social media is being sold as a powerful branding tool.
The problem can be exasperated when larger brands begin bridging the gap between social media and offline advertising. It becomes a major problem when brands start advertising their Facebook fan pages or Twitter accounts.
Don’t understand why it’s a problem? Take a look at the Vitamin Water example.
The ad was created to push users to their Facebook fan page. In the there’s a call to action, sending usings to Facebook.com/vitaminwater – their fan page.
What Vitamin Water did makes sense on the surface. But why not take it one step further and make it better? Why not advertise the Vitamin Water website and forward users to the Facebook fan page?
The trick is pretty simple actually. All you have to do is create a URL that redirects to the Facebook fan page. So on our brand site, we create our own URL, vitaminwater.com/fb that redirects to our Facebook page.
Now we can promote the vitaminwater.com URL and have our website gain all the branding value from the offline advertising.
Creating a Vanity URL
Building vanity URLs is really simple for WordPress users. Start by first installing the Redirection plugin. It allows you to quickly create 301 redirects and vanity URLs.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, log into WordPress and go to the Tools tab. Then look for the Redirection options page. Within the Redirections page, create a vanity URL by filling out the form and clicking save.
There’s no reason a large business should lose any branding value from multi-million dollar offline advertising campaigns. It’s extremely simple to create a vanity URL for when other marketing disciplines are being used to promote social media campaigns.
How are you making the most of your online branding? What tricks have you identified for putting your brand front and center?
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