3 Ways to Improve Your Branding Efforts with Social Media and Blogging

Kristel Staci

June 25, 2019

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When you look at how large the internet is -- with more than a billion active sites and more than three billion people on social media -- it can be a pretty scary place for a business or brand. It's not just a matter of getting attention and reaching your exact target audience, it's more like a miracle that some of us can rank on page one of Google for any relevant keywords at all.

However, even with how big the internet is, we all seem to do pretty well and continue to take advantage of all of the opportunities around us. At the same time, if you try and use all of them, you might quickly find yourself getting spread to thin. Whether it's SEO, social media, paid advertising, content creation or lead acquisition -- they all work extremely well, but only if you can focus a good amount of attention on each.

At the same time, each social platform is different in their own was as well. For examples on how some of the top brands in the world are taking advantage of what Instagram has to offer, read this article.

With all of this in mind, today we are going to break down three methods everything professional, brand, and business should have in place when focusing on their blogging and social media efforts. Some of these might seem simple and obvious, but you would be surprised at how many people are still making these mistakes daily.

1 - Secure Your Name as Your Domain and Social Media Usernames

When someone heads over to Google and inserts your personal name, what will they find? Hopefully, it's your main website or blog ranking in the first position, followed by a bunch of your social profiles and positive press or article contributions. No matter if it's your personal name, brand or business, this is something you will want to have cleaned up and in place from day one.

This is the best way to control what appears in the search results, and blogging with social media is the best way to master this process.

When starting a business or brand online, your name is going to be everything. It's extremely important to have your personal name as your domain name, preferably in the .com version. However, with so many people already online and building out their own websites and blogs, if you have a common name, it's likely already taken.

Instead, you can go with a .net or a .org name. But if both of those are taken, you also have a few other options.

Come up with a new name you want to use or brand
Try and purchase the domain from whoever owns it
Use a different TLD and continue with your site

To see what options are available in reference to your domain name, I recommend you use this domain name tool. Not only will you be provided with a list of the most popular TLDs that are available or taken, but you can also sort by category and see what other TLDs might be available.

In addition to setting this type of branding up for your site and blog, you will also need to do the same thing for your social profile accounts. Again, depending on how popular your name is, this might be easier/harder to accomplish.

In short, you want your domain and social profiles to be pretty much universal. This is a big easier with brand names, as they often are owned by the brand. For example, look at any of the world’s top entrepreneurs and you can often find them as their exact name (as their brand) — and also on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

You are likely already on the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn... but what about the other 500+ smaller social platforms out there as well? If you want to secure your name on these, you can spend a few hours and do this manually, or you can run a quick search on Knowem, to see what the social username landscape looks like.

In either case, when picking a domain name and social usernames for your personal brand or business, please try to keep them simple, direct, and consistent across all platforms.

2 - Schedule Out Your Best Evergreen Content

Content is King... but it's also saturating the internet like a wildfire that never ends. As I previously mentioned, there are now over a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today -- which means they are all creating content and it's just making the process of being found harder and harder.

As important as content creation and marketing is, most individuals and brands are still doing it wrong.

Instead of creating a ton of content and just putting it out there, more time should be spent on creating evergreen content, and continued promotion to it time and time again. Evergreen content is simply content that will keep working for you time and time again. It's a topic or focus that simple doesn't go out of style, and something that you should be able to update every once in a while and still have it serve value to an audience.

You can learn more about evergreen marketing and how to find the best examples out there, in this resource from Buzzsumo.

Once you have a good understanding on how important evergreen content is and how to come up with some ideas for your site, it's time to get to work. After going live with your articles, it's then time to put in the most important part -- the promotional aspect!

Since we are focusing strictly on social media and blogging, these are the two examples we will use. With blogging, the opportunity is always there to guest post and contribute content to other websites and blogs (like I'm doing in this one). By increasing mentions, backlinks, and traffic to your site, this will help your evergreen content grow and rank over time.

With social media, you need to reach more audiences and increase social shares. Don't just send traffic to your site and hope they click the social sharing button, instead, put your own marketing efforts and a social media sharing strategy in place.

Here are some key points to remember when creating an effective social media strategy.

Schedule out your content for several months
Keep sharing your best content, using different text
Switch up your social thumbnails and post images
See what methods are resulting in the most shares, and replicate

With all of these elements in place and working to increase your evergreen content reach daily, within a few months you should start to see some steady traction over the competition.

3 - Interview, Feature and Tag Experts in Your Niche

As important as it is to focus on your own personal or business brand, it would be a huge mistake to not take advantage of the many other experts and influencers within your industry as well.

Through the use of interviews, features, expert roundups, and podcasts, everyone is sharing new content with their blog and social media followers. Should you interview or write about one of these experts on your site (and then tag them on social media), there is a good chance they will share your content with their audiences as well.

Vanity is everything, and who wouldn't want to share something about themselves to more people?