A very exacting guide to build a powerful brand presence online is an optimized use of social media. Leveraging social media tools to their full proximity can help a small business gain momentum and pace in no time. This pace can be mapped in the traffic that visits one’s corporate website and the return on investment it guarantees. It does happen at times, and at various instances we see that many a small firm get really gung-ho initially, about their Twitter and Facebook presence, but when the business shows no real growth or performance, agonized & exasperated, these small businesses give up completely!

That we firmly believe is inappropriate, since instead of throwing in your towels and accepting defeat that is the time for any firm to expand its reach wider! One needs to spread further than merely posting a few tweets about what they’re upto! Social media is expansive. Its very many tools can be aptly used to pull off linear thought, vision and purpose of a brand. Quite a few of these tools, such as blogs, micro-blogs, RSS feed, video-uploading, and photo-sharing can all be used to empower one’s presence online.  Use these basic cues to strategise it well:

Plan it right!

Hence, the first thing to be overlooked is that you should abstain from jumping headlong in the social media pool. Else you will be lost in the multitude of fishes. It is very important to strategise well. Leave least scope for serendipity to steep in! Please pen your thoughts, aspirations and goals. And when we say be clear, we mean it! Check if your goal is volumising sales or empowering brand presence. This will give you a clear idea about the next very important issue. 

Who are you targeting?

Knowing one’s audience helps. This will help you set the tone for your audience on the social media page. This will boost conversations, and increase the number of topics that you could bring to your social media walls. 

Behave yourself.

Another important caution, just do not be rude, commanding, vulgar or cursing with a customer, or even a competitor online. IT is a sure shot way to ruin your brand presence. It will not only kill your brand’s reputation online but it will also trigger wrong vibes in the customer’s mindsets.

Youtube has created a new frontier in the media world. Short videos are now consumed on a regular basis by almost anyone, and thanks to 3G technology, almost anywhere. With so many people watching so many videos all the time, advertisers are circling like sharks in the ocean to try and tap the market. The potential is huge—if done properly, online video advertising could reach hundreds of thousands of viewers in a week. In fact, the potential of online video advertising is larger than just about any other form of reaching customers. So, how come you don’t see more online video advertising splashed all over the videos you watch every day? After all, most of the text articles you search are covered in ads, since many people monetize their blogs that way (and many content sites pay their contributors and earn their way with ads.) But when you call up a video on Youtube, 99 times out of 100 you don’t have to sit through ad spots or mini-commercials. Why aren’t more people taking advantage of this incredible opportunity?

Well, for one, it’s hard to stay ahead of the game. Thanks to social media, videos go viral extremely fast, and then once everyone has seen them and shared them, they aren’t really watched again. Advertisers know that once a video is popular it’s too late to put together an ad to slap on it, and before a video is popular there’s no guarantee that it will ever be popular.

Online Video Advertising Solutions

Like every problem, this can be solved. Youtube, for one, could have advertisers purchase ad credits and create an ad spot. As soon as a video starts to greatly increase in hits in a certain period of time a video ad could automatically be applied to it. For example, say a video only got 100 hits in its first week on Youtube, but then it starts to go viral. A simple algorithm could detect that the frequency of hits was accelerating when the video went from 100 hits to a couple thousand in a single day, and automatically apply the ad, so that it would be seen by (probably) hundreds of thousands or millions of people by the end of a week or so.

So far, online advertisers do not seem to be thinking this big. Most are settling for finding steady, popular content, like webcasts, that have a regular audience, and inserting advertising there. Others are relying on product placement, like a popular video blogger that is always seen drinking a certain brand during his videos. The point is, no matter what method you use, the potential for reaching customers is huge, especially if you run an online business where your services are available worldwide. How many people watch online videos, and then email links to everyone they know, or post a link on Twitter or Facebook? Online video advertising is an idea that hasn’t yet been used well, and it’s wide open for someone to figure out the best way to do it. 

Being new, video media has scope for endless experimentation. Also, it allows you another way to circulate your popularity online.