While search engine marketing and optimization are critical elements of marketers’ branding efforts through Google, other sites, such as Google+ and Twitter, offer additional branding opportunities. In particular, Facebook provides the best example of the benefits of building brand identity within a destination site.

The outreaching brand

On Facebook, marketers were quick to launch branded pages linking to their own websites. The traffic to their Facebook pages quickly took off. However, consumers don’t always want to leave the Facebook site to click out to individual business websites — in many cases, they are happier to interact with the brand in the Facebook environment. The key was to bring the brand to the consumer.

Today, successful brands go where consumers congregate rather than wait for consumers to come to them. This requires building up an extensive brand presence within consolidated sites — in essence, syndicating the brand experience on digital properties outside of their business’s own domain. Brands such as Coca-Cola, Disney, and Starbucks have been successful in creating powerful brand destinations within Facebook, with ever-growing fan bases of more than 20 million each.

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