Facebook and brand management

Facebook and brand management



Facebook and brand management

Introduction

What is a brand

At the heart of every successful business is a brand. What a brand is and how to build it is something that a lot of small businesses owners are keen to understand. There are different aspects of a brand such as: The brand identity. This is how your company looks and is achieved though the logo and brand colours. With more than 68 million active users of Facebook. com, organizations are seeking to tap into the relationship development potential these sites offer. In April 2006, Facebook opened its registration process to organizations, and more than 4000 organizations joined within 2 weeks (Christ, 2005, 45-76)

Facebook as a brand

With an average of 250,000 people registering to use Facebook daily, organizations cannot ignore the social networking phenomenon. Public relations-oriented blogs and trade publications have promoted these sites as relationship building tools (e.g., Dugan, 2007; Social Networking, 2008), but little is known about how these organizations are using these sites to cultivate relationships with their publics. Several applications have been created by Facebook and outside programmers that are designed to help organizations with their fundraising and relationship cultivation efforts. The most popular fundraising application is Causes, the 18th most popular application on Facebook, allows individuals to donate to a registered organization and recruit others to support the cause(Christ, 2005, 45-76). Other applications, such as Justgiving, ChipIn, and SponsorMe, all allow individuals to make donations to nonprofits on Facebook and give organizations the opportunity to send informational messages to their supporters. Whether providing a listing of events to become involved with or methods to contribute and volunteer, organizations must strive to make their sites more interactive. (Christ, 2005, 45-76)

Explantion

Most nonprofits lack the resources or time to provide constant attention to a Facebook page. Creating a profile and then abandoning it will create only minimal exposure for the organization, and it could turn off potential supporters if they witness inactivity on the site. Therefore, many nonprofits are turning to the heaviest users of social networking sites for assistance. College interns and volunteers are often in charge of managing nonprofits' Facebook presence because they have knowledge on appropriate uses of the site and are often already personally invested into social networking (Westcott, 2007, 56)

Social networking sites can be an effective way to reach stakeholder groups if organizations understand how their stakeholders use the sites. Results from this study show that nonprofits are beginning to experiment with different Facebook offerings. As social networking sites become more ingrained in daily life, they will soon see a more diverse audience in terms of age, culture and socio-economic status. Then, nonprofits will need to begin using more social networking applications social networking to meet the growing needs and expectations of their stakeholders.The brand promise. This is the essence of what the company offers customers and how it positions itself. For example, the brand promise could be an offer of superb customer service or ...