Social Media has had a tremendous impact in promoting brands, generating leads and boosting sales, and this is the reason why positioning and differentiation are critical to the creation of a brand in the realm of social media.
Successful social media marketing means the selection of your product by the consumer and the rejection of all the other products in the market space. This is the true challenge of creating a brand in the social media era.
There is today countless brands in food products, in cars, clothes, electronics, readymade dresses, toiletries, etc. The question arises – how does a marketer get a prospective buyer to focus on the one brand that the marketer is selling. The simple answer to that is two-fold – “positioning” and “differentiation”.
In the world of social media, bulk of the content of a brand is created by users themselves via posts, blogs, video, video blogs, and pictures. If a person has ten friends and each of these ten friends shares one thing with them each day, this is immense content.
Never forget that there is a lot of brands for a prospect to focus on before making a buying decision. It is your job to evolve the right strategies so that the consumer focuses on your brand and not distracted by the rest.
Remember that social media is all about engagement. An important issue that a marketer has to focus on is the potential of the social media. In simple terms, content that begins with just two can quickly become a network of 1,000. Social media works almost instantly and has tremendous reach.
Many marketers feel that the two terms – “positioning” and “differentiation -are the same. The social media have however made these two words different. Because there is so much content, and because the networks are so viral, a marketer must be exceptionally skilful in setting his brand apart.
The marketer must clearly understand that there are distinctions between the two if he/she has to create a strong and impactful social media brand. To create a brand in the social media, a marketer must know that positioning is ‘a frame of reference’, and that differentiation is a ‘strategy of perception’. You must learn to differentiate your brand after it is positioned.
Social media are influencing the buying community in ways many have never imagined. With more profile integration than ever before, it’s important to understand how to manage your digital personality.
Using major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ it’s easy to develop and project a unique personality of your brand and position it adequately. You must then think of ways to distinguish your brand from the rest.