Brands need to adopt social media to prosper

Roll back a few years and the main piece of advice for companies seemed to be “get a website”.

We we told that any company that couldn’t be found online would go out of business. That’s not strictly true, of course — it depends a lot on the business — but what is happening is that the stakes are being raised.

Now, it’s not enough to have a website. You need a social media presence and a strategy to drive it.

With Google and Bing incorporating social network data into their search results, there’s an even more compelling argument for brands to capitalise on the power of social, according to Reality Digital.

With the rise in social media comes the need for reputation management — seeing what people are saying about a company or brand and communicating positively with both fans and detractors.

Robert Proctor at Reality Digital said, “Those brands that employ brand focused social networking applications will stand to benefit from these deals hugely, as through this they not only have the benefit of heightened consumer interactivity, but they may also start to see some of the great content from their networks appearing within search engine results.”