Apr 25, 2013

Things To Consider Before Rebranding Your Social Media

Frequently reassessing the success and viability of your social media branding is undoubtedly a part of smart marketing management. Little tweaks to your profiles and content and streams of engagement are frequently necessary. But before you make the decision to embark on a major social media branding overhaul (which, don’t kid yourself, is a huge undertaking) make sure you are considering all the aspects of the project and its ramifications on your small business. The main question to consider is “why?” What exactly are your motives for rebranding? Here are a few factors that can help you get to the bottom of what’s driving you to want to rebrand. Good food for thought before you fully decide to go for it:

Feeling lost in the crowd
- It happens often that a small business owner will feel like their social media branding accurately represents them and does an adequate job at all it’s supposed to accomplish, but still has a problem: it’s too much an invisible part of the crowd. If you’re in an industry that has other players who are equally social media savvy, sometimes branding that seems “good” suddenly isn’t “good enough”. If you feel like you need to step it up in order to stand out, rebranding might be worthwhile.

How will your followers feel?
- Any major shifts to your social media could result in losing some followers. You can’t please everyone. But if other factors lead you to determine that rebranding is what’s best overall, it’s okay to accept this relatively minor hit to your popularity within your market. Make sure to give plenty of announcement ahead of time about the changes to come, and secure your URL while keeping your “old” social media accounts active with links to your new online profiles. One of the biggest downsides of rebranding is losing followers in transition, but patient, calculated steps can mitigate that as much as possible.

Possible market growth
- If you see the possibility of major market growth in a certain direction, and rebranding would make you better positioned to take advantage of that, it might be time to go for it. Sure, there are always risks and costs when rebranding, but growing your business and attracting more customers is, after all, the point. Looking to greener pastures is your job, and sometimes the payoff is worth the risk.

Recovering from bad PR
- Bad reviews can hurt your business long after they occur. Depending on how public and widespread these reviews or incidents are, sometimes they can’t be neutralized and recovered from just by fixing internal problems or addressing specific issues. Sometimes, you really do have to distance yourself from your own brand in order to move on as a business with a clean(er) slate. If you’ve looked into other, less drastic methods of reputation management and still feel like overhauling your brand is the best way to start fresh, go for it.

Changes in your market
- Much like social media itself, a lot of industries are constantly evolving and changing. Maybe your company’s social media branding reflects an outdated portrayal of your industry and market interests. There are obviously smaller steps you can take to stay abreast of changes to your industry, but they can only go so far. Sometimes it’s time to change your game to get ahead and stay relevant.

Growing or changing your business
- Maybe it’s not your industry or market so much as your company itself that’s changing. If you’re planning to launch a new product line or service that changes the landscape of your small business, you need to look at the overall picture and make sure that your branding on social media is the best it can be to reflect who your company is becoming, and effectively goes after the entire market that is open to you.