Branded Content on Social Media

Social media platforms have become a powerful marketing tool for brands in order to reach new audiences and engage with them. Creative content is a vital part of social media marketing strategies, as innovative content can attract more users and improve brand health. In this chapter, the channels and creative strategies that are being utilized by marketers in social media are explored, and brand health, which is how the brand is evaluated by consumers, is examined. Brand health is an indicator for brand equity in the long run, and as such, the impact of social media marketing on it should be considered by managers.

The Concept of Brand Identity

In this chapter, the concepts of brand identity and brand image and the linkage between them, brand loyalty, are explored, and the way firms can enhance brand loyalty is explained briefly. The challenges that companies face in today's world are touched upon to give managers a better insight as to how different their efforts should be compared to the old days. This chapter also contains material on how to build brands, as a model is reviewed that can help in this regard. Different facets of brand identity are explained briefly, and concepts such as customer empowerment and co-creation of brands are described.

Social Media Branding Strategy

Social media have changed the way brands and consumers interact with each other. This revolution has forced many companies to utilize social media platforms in their marketing plans, but they also tend to forget that these new tools require the companies to change and modify their marketing efforts to better suit social media. In this chapter, social media marketing strategies and frameworks that should be adopted by brand managers and marketers are explored briefly and social media platforms are categorized into different groups so that managers can get a better picture of the practices that each group require in order to produce the best results for the brands.

The Impact of Social Media on Brand Loyalty

Companies are always looking for different ways to increase their profits, and they often find themselves searching for new customers to grow their business. Acquiring new customers costs more than trying to encourage current ones to repurchase. This is the value of customer loyalty. In this chapter, the concept of brand loyalty is explored along with elements that influence it. In order to achieve loyalty, firms need to increase brand engagement to build deeper relationships with their customers. In previous chapters, the role of social media in brand engagement was explored, and as a result, the role of social media in creating brand royalty is explored in this chapter.

The Role of Social Media in Special Types of Brand Building

In previous chapters, the importance of social media in branding activities was explored. The question that remains is the role that social media play in various forms of branding. First, the concept of destination branding, and the way destination marketing organizations can utilize social media in branding activities are explored. Then, personal branding and its importance, along with the role of social media in achieving it, are explored. Finally, in the last section of this chapter, a relatively new concept is described. Employer branding is the implementation of branding activities in human resource management. It is regarded as a crucial part of every successful brand in today's world. Social media can help companies improve their employer brand, a role that is explained further in this chapter.

Managing Brands Through Social Media

In this chapter, the authors describe the concept of brand community and how it is changing in the context of social media, and how it will impact brand trust and brand loyalty. Then they turn their gaze toward brand storytelling, a concept that has always been on the forefront of marketing activities but has recently been affected by social media in a way that traditionalists have had a hard time learning how to work around. Negative consumer-generated brand stories are a new type of crisis that brand managers are just getting acquainted with, and can harm the brand reputation severely if they are not dealt with accordingly. Finally, the authors talk briefly about the branding approaches that should be adopted by marketers if they want their brands to survive in the new age of social media.

The Concept of Social Media

In the previous chapter, the authors briefly looked at different aspects of branding and how they should be implemented within companies. Recently, the world of marketing has seen a revolutionary shift, as traditional media—which until now were dominating the world of marketing—are becoming less effective, and instead, social media is gaining more power. In this chapter, the authors compare the impacts of traditional and social media on brand equity and also look at how different measures such as customer lifetime value, customer influencer value, and customer knowledge value are being affected by social media platforms. Social media are examined more closely to see how they are composed and what building blocks they use. This helps managers to better integrate social media in their marketing strategies in order to gain the most bang for their buck.