I’ve been conscious of branding since I started my business almost a decade ago. I was quickly successful branding my business name, The Cogent Consulting Group. I also wanted to develop a personal brand as a part of my coaching. As my name is rather common, I developed my personal brand as The Cogent Coach.
With a unique business name, branding was quite easy, helping me on social media as well as with the search engines. Having a brand that stands out and helps people find you across the Internet is a great value to any business.
One of the tools I’ve used in my branding is Twylah (http://twylah.com). It helps categorize social posts and links content across platforms. It turns Twitter and Tweets into a blog-like site that can reside on your own site. (here is mine) The benefits of using Twylah are manifold. My site draws more traffic, my audience is more engaged, and my content is organized into categories that make it easy for visitors to follow threads across platforms.
Recently, Twylah has become even more powerful for brand building and maintenance. The team at Twylah has created a Brand Tracker that incorporates a Brand Dashboard into your Twylah page.
When you start with the Brand Tracker, you first fill out a questionnaire where you select a number of primary and secondary topics you want to have as a part of your brand. When you’re done, you receive a report that “grades” you on your success in associating your brand with the topics you’ve selected.
That’s when the fun starts!
The Brand Tracker evaluates three areas: Focus, Consistency, and Resonance. Focus measures how many of your Tweets are about the topics you’ve chosen. Consistency examines how often and reliably you Tweet about your brand subjects. Resonance measures how engaged your audience is with your Tweets.
I was quite excited when my email announced that my Brand Report was finished. It was a bit of a shock to find that I scored an “F.”
It turns out that my Tweets weren’t focused, I wasn’t Tweeting regularly on those topics and my engagement across my chosen brand topics was low. Ouch!
Eric and Kelly Kim, the creators of Twylah, are gifted social media experts and along with the grade in the report, there are pages of instructions and guidelines on how to improve your score. Of course, the score is just a representation of how effective you are on social media in creating a brand. By following their recommendations my branding has become much more effective.
I’ve revised my 10 topics multiple times, which has helped me tighten up my focus nicely. It’s not only influenced the content I share, but also the content I create. By seeing the topics as interrelated parts of a whole branding effort, I’ve become more focused, create a better flow of information that I share and helped me engage with others who are interested in the same subjects.
At the same time, I’m much more aware of consistently engaging on the topics important to my brand. Twylah integrates with Buffer, which allows me to spread my Tweets across the day at times when my followers are most likely to be online.
Which is another great feature of Twylah – it helps you find content related to your topic areas. The dashboard show your engagement and focus and also links to suggested content that you can share on your topics. The posts are appropriately hashtagged and can be staggered via Buffer.
Not only is Twylah helping me stay focused on my branding, it’s helping me create and share content that enables my branding and provides me with a dashboard to measure my success.
Twylah has always been a part of our marketing system, but it’s now become even more valuable by becoming a brilliant branding tool as well!
Branding is the peak of our system, helping create familiarity and exposure for a business. The stage is then set to integrate with influencers, micro-influencers and your customers creating a powerful and integrated marketing system. Twylah has become a integral part not only in my branding, but how we help our clients with their marketing.
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Michael Nelson “The Cogent Coach”
