Reasons to Avoid Building a Brand on Social Media
When building a brand, people should resist basing a customer community on conventional social media networks. While many companies are doing so these days, and many companies are even being encouraged to do so, it ultimately isn’t going to be a strategy that will work for businesses universally. On social media networks, the information is free and available to everyone, and it certainly doesn’t belong to the business. They have very little control over it.
Businesses will have very little control over the platform in general when they try to build their brands using social media. The social media pages of businesses have a wild, unfiltered, unregulated look to them in many cases, and this often isn’t a good thing for businesses. Social media profiles also largely allow customers to be anonymous. When businesses get customers through lead generation, they will know more about the personal information of their members. On social media websites, people are notoriously vague collections of followers, which often isn’t going to really help businesses. It makes more sense for businesses to develop their own customer community platforms.
Getting a Customer Community Platform
Businesses that have websites which have forums and other areas where customers can meet one another and discuss what they think of a particular business have assembled a customer community platform. More and more businesses are realizing the importance of customer community platforms for themselves, and more and more businesses are setting them up personally.
When businesses have their own customer community platforms, they control the data that is related to them. They can evaluate that data easily in order to spot trends in what their customers are doing and who their customers are in terms of their demographics. They won’t just be forced to try to make something out of the big and shapeless collections of data that people will often find when they rely on social media websites.
It should also be noted that it reflects well on a given business if it has a customer community platform. Many small or amateurish businesses are advertising their goods and services on social media. The businesses that have their own customer community platforms are going to be the ones who have enough time, money, and help to support something like that. It creates a positive first impression with potential customers. Naturally, these potential customers are actually going to have a more substantial meeting place thanks to the customer community platform, which is only going to improve customer retention at that level.
The image of a brand is going to be that much more strongly defined when there is a customer community platform to go with it. A brand that has its own community appears to be a strong brand, and it is. The appearance of strength in a brand will only increase the strength in a brand over time, creating something of a positive feedback loop. Brands will only achieve more prominence when there is a community surrounding them, which is going to make all the difference in terms of the level of visibility that a given brand is able to achieve.
Being able to set aside a space for the customers associated with a particular brand manages to communicate a lot about how much or how little people are talking about a product. If they are all gathering in one place to talk about a brand, then they are demonstrating a level of dedication that is not going to be seen on social media. People can idly visit the pages of the brands that they like and idly share information or post something as part of their generic social media experience. When people deliberately seek out the customer community platforms associated with a particular brand, they are making a much more powerful statement and strengthening the brand at the same time.
There are many different customer community platforms available today, given the substantial benefits that are associated with having communities like this. Avon has one at: http://www.avonbeautyconnects.co.uk/. Given the age of the Avon company and the fact that it has created so many independent merchants over the years, it should not surprise anyone that Avon would have developed a customer community platform.
The tech company Hewlett-Packard has another substantial customer community platform at: http://h30434.www3.hp.com/. Hewlett-Packard is one of the most successful companies in the world, and it has had a great deal of staying power. It isn’t surprising that so many successful companies have customer community platforms, which reflects and contributes to their overall success.