Securing Your Brand on the Internet

Written by: Karin Pinter
July 19th, 2010 at 5:48 pm, filed under Branding, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

I’m a firm believer in hogging your online identity, be it through purchasing a domain name with your personal name, as well as maintaining a streamlined means of communicating with your online followers. It builds consistency and recognition across various platforms, as well as protecting your overall presence.

As you plug into all the different networks, try to keep this in the same format you may already be using for Twitter and other social networking accounts you manage, as it streamlines your online presence to help people remember and look you up later.

A few examples to get you started…

Your Company Domain Name
Registering a few variations of this generally won’t burn the budget, so feel free to buy a handful of domains if you feel that your company may benefit from securing a little more brand protection for itself. You can redirect those you’re not using to the one you choose to develop your site on.

Changing your URL on Facebook
If you run a Business Page, you can change the URL from the default settings provided when you registered it in the first place, although you will need to have at least 25 fans before you can make this change, so start sharing your Page with everyone! Simply go to:
http://www.facebook.com/username/

After you’ve done that, remember to update any other links to your Facebook Page from your site/s, email signatures, social media pages, etc. to reflect this new URL.

Also, if you don’t have a website (call us… ehem), you can create a Facebook Business Page to build additional online presence for your business & services.

Being on Twitter doesn’t mean being a twit
You may not tweet as much as your neighbor next door, and its basic character limitations may be frustrating at times… yet if you’re putting your brand online, make sure you secure this too. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to ‘take’ your intended twitter name and confuse prospective clients? Even if you’re not using it on a daily basis, it’s great for redirecting visitors to your site for full news and updates, or sharing other sites & articles that reference your business.
eg: twitter.com/muttmaniacs

Yelp
Most businesses are built through word of mouth referrals. Yelp is a fantastic resource to generate this same type of online buzz for your business, since people post reviews on Yelp pages as a means of sharing their insights and discoveries. It is therefore an excellent tool to compile online testimonials and build brand recognition by which people will feel more encouraged to engage in business with you. If the web is all about conversation, then you’ll certainly find people talking about you on Yelp! As I mentioned on our section for Facebook, Yelp is also a handy platform on which to create a listing on if you do not have a website of your own. It provides you with a search engine friendly avenue by which your clients and potential clients can find you online.
eg: http://www.yelp.com/biz/mutt-maniacs-los-angeles

Business Networking Sites (because the net… works…)
You may be part of BNI, YPO or other such business networking collectives. Make sure you keep your company profile up to date so that others in your direct network can be sure to find you when they need to refer business to you.

Connecting all the dots…
So, once you have all of these bits and pieces in place, you can connect your blog with your Twitter account, and your Facebook Business Page updates too. This way, posting in one place will populate all your other accounts in one fell swoop. It will also populate the search engines with more references about you, so that when people ‘Google’ your business name they will come across something like this: