Social Media Branding

When using social media as a route of branding organizations are able to reach more people at a lower cost. Although there are organizations that do invest in a well developed marketing team, with the use of social media they are able to share content and advertise for less than half the cost, sometimes even for free, than they would if they were not using social media. Social media can be a great tool for branding, but some organizations may face strong disadvantages from social media if its target audience is not well related to social media or if it is not careful with the team it creates to be responsible for how the organization is seen by millions of people sometimes outside of their target audience. 

For example an organization targeting people over the age of 70 may not see much movement when trying to advertise in platforms such as instagram or twitter because its target audience is not abundant in those platforms. Another example of how social media can backfire is that of the fashion app Dote. The marketing team for this organization has used platforms such as instagram and youtube to get in contact with “influencers” that would promote the app to its target audience. Unfortunately the app’s team was not careful enough and found itself in a scandal related to discriminatory practices. In Dote’s case social media branding backfired, once the organization became part of social media through youtube and instagram, the platform communities would easily speak about the scandal and quickly spread the information causing a large number of people in Dote’s target audience to refrain from using the app.

An organization can lose control over how its brand is spread through social media. When content is shared on social media it becomes available to hundreds of people and those numbers only increase. Once a brand has been exposed either negatively or positively to people on social media there is no way of going back, content exposed will always remain in the minds of those who viewed it. Has your perception of a brand been altered due to something you saw about it in social media? What do you think would have been the outcome of the brand’s reputation and image had it not been shared on social media?