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Image Branding

Is social media a fad?  96% of Generation Y have joined some social network platform or other.  This is a huge revolutionary shift in the way of networking and communications.  If you have not joined any social network or started the process of image branding, you will find that it will be very beneficial especially if you are looking at promoting your own business or company.

Facebook is one of the most popular social network platforms on the internet.  It grew exponentially and hit 100 million users in less than 9 months, a phenomenon not seen before.  In fact, it took Radio 38 years, TV 13 years and the Internet 4 years to hit 50 million users.  Imagine if Facebook were a city, it would be the 4th most populated after China, India and the United States.

YouTube has more than 100,000,000 videos and is the second largest search engine in the world. Videos are another way of branding.

Twitter is a great microblogging networking platform and 80% of Twitter users update via their mobile phones.  This means that they can update anytime at their convenience, anywhere in the world.  Since Apr 2009, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors each month.

There are more than 200,000,000 blogs on the internet and study shows that 34% of bloggers post opinions about brands of products and services.  Picture yourself having a bad experience with either a product or service.  What would you do?  Well, you can imagine if the bloggers have any negative experience, news of it will spread like wildfire on the internet via the various social media and networking platforms and before you know it, everyone will be abuzz about it.

On the flip side of the coin, if you have a good reputation and your brand is well-liked, this will go a long way in helping you with your product and/or service.

In a recent survey, it was found that 25% of search results for the world’s top twenty largest brands are links to user-generated content.  It seems that in the near future, people will no longer need to search for products and/or services.  Instead, the products and/or services will find them through social media.

Nowadays, people care more about how the social graph ranks products and/or services rather than the Google search rankings.  Which would you have more trust in?  An advertisement that you came across or a recommendation from a friend or follower?  The answer is obvious.  Do you realize that only 14% of consumers trust advertisements whereas 78% trust peer recommendation?  What does this tell you?

Social media is here to stay.  If you do not jump on the social network platform bandwagon and start branding yourself today, you will be losing out against all those who have already started their image branding on the various social network platform.

Statistics extracted from www.socialnomics.com