Social media marketing as an integral part of brand management online

As with all marketing and corporate communications activities, it is important to formulate concrete goals and make them as operational as possible. Possible objectives of a social media engagement can include:

• Reputation, image, building trust
• Brand loyalty, brand ambassadors, brand trust
• Public image of the company
• Corporate communications
• Accompanying or initiating a campaign
• Support of market research
• Sales promotion / support of the sales process
• Customer care / service center
• Recruiting / staffing
• Participation in product development / improvement
• Search engine optimization /-ranking
• Crisis management / communication
• Network building / gaining contacts

It is important that the goals are verifiable and, above all, realistic. Even though social media engagement offers great potential for marketing and brand management, it is not an all-round miracle weapon à la "I'm going to set up a Twitter account for my company and increase my sales by 10% as a result. Social media engagement means courage, perseverance, continuity and flexibility.