Introduction

In today’s highly competitive market environment, possessing strong brand influence is a key factor for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to gain sustained competitive advantages. Brand influence not only increases product recognition and customer loyalty but also enhances a company’s market position and bargaining power. With the rapid development of social media, SMEs can effectively utilize these platforms to disseminate brand information, strengthen brand influence, and expand market share. This article begins by emphasizing the importance of brand influence for SMEs, analyses the role of social media in SME brand building, and proposes specific strategies for SMEs to enhance brand influence on social media. The goal is to provide practical guidelines for SMEs to strengthen their brand influence effectively.

The Importance of Brand Influence for SMEs

Brand influence refers to the level of consumer recognition, preference, and loyalty toward a brand. A strong brand influence not only increases the added value of products and enhances customers’ desire to purchase but also improves a company’s bargaining and profitability capabilities, creating more opportunities for growth. For SMEs, possessing strong brand influence has the following important implications:

1. Enhancing Product Competitiveness
   A strong brand influence makes it easier for consumers to recognize and remember the company’s products, fostering trust and preference, and thereby boosting product competitiveness.
2. Increasing Customer Loyalty
   Strong brand influence strengthens customer loyalty, making them more likely to support the company’s products over the long term, which improves customer retention.
3. Expanding Market Share
   A strong brand influence enhances a company’s exposure and reputation in the market, attracting more potential customers and thereby increasing market share.
4. Improving Bargaining Power
   A strong brand influence adds value to products, giving the company greater bargaining power and enhancing profitability.

The figure below further illustrates the impact of enhancing brand influence on the future development of SMEs:

Therefore, SMEs must prioritize enhancing their brand influence. This is not only a critical step in improving competitiveness but also an essential path to achieving sustained development.

The Role of Social Media in SME Brand Building

Social media refers to various online platforms built on internet technology that focus on social interactions, such as Weibo, WeChat, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter. These platforms have become vital arenas for SMEs to showcase their brand image and enhance their influence. As shown in Figure 2, the scale of social commerce has seen rapid growth since 2017.

The rapid development of social media brings new opportunities for SME brand building:

1. Increasing Brand Awareness and Exposure
   SMEs can use social media platforms to widely disseminate brand information. Content marketing and social interactions can significantly boost brand awareness and exposure.
2. Enhancing Interaction with Target Customers
   Social media provides SMEs with direct communication channels to engage with target customers, strengthening interactions and fostering customer loyalty.
3. Optimizing Brand Image and Reputation
   SMEs can use social media to respond promptly to customer feedback, repair brand image, and maintain their reputation.
4. Gaining Market Insights and Customer Data
   Social media provides SMEs with rich customer behaviour data, helping them better understand their target audience and optimize marketing strategies.

Social media offers SMEs unprecedented opportunities and possibilities for brand building. Therefore, SMEs should actively explore effective strategies to enhance brand influence through social media.

Strategies for Enhancing Brand Influence on Social Media

1. Precise Positioning and Personalized Content Creation

To effectively enhance brand influence on social media, SMEs must first precisely identify their target audience through market analysis, data collection, and buyer persona creation. Precise positioning enables the development of personalized content. For example, SMEs can use tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite to analyse user preferences and behaviours. Segmenting users and creating detailed personas can help companies understand their needs and pain points. Based on this information, SMEs can design tailored advertisements or recommendations to improve satisfaction and conversion rates.

Take Tong Ren Tang as an example. The company classifies users into three levels: “helpless,” “nervous,” and “interested but hesitant.” For “helpless” users, they distribute educational content to build trust. For “nervous” users, they offer customized problem-solving solutions to establish connections. For “interested but hesitant” users, they engage them through interactive games or Q&A sessions, deepening their interest and brand preference. This stratified approach helps direct users into the appropriate engagement pool, further enhancing trust².

2. Content Marketing to Build Brand Influence

In addition to precise user targeting, SMEs should leverage content marketing to establish their brand influence on social media. Quality content attracts attention and increases brand exposure.

For instance, in 2019, DeRUCCI Bedding, as a sponsor of the FIBA Basketball World Cup, launched the “Summer of Basketball” campaign. They targeted basketball fans as their audience and collaborated with sports influencers to produce engaging articles that combined the World Cup with DeRUCCI’s health-related sleep culture. By riding the wave of the World Cup’s popularity, their brand influence doubled, garnering 330 million views and 140,000 discussions. The total readership of influencer articles reached 15.13 million, and the DeRUCCI brand index increased by 100% compared to before the campaign³.

3. Leveraging Influencers and Live Streaming for Promotion

In recent years, influencer live streaming has become a key method for SMEs to expand social channels and boost brand influence. This emerging marketing model not only reduces advertising costs but also strengthens brand credibility through real-time interaction with consumers.

For example, Cha Bai Dao is the first tea brand achieved over 100 million yuan GMV during its TikTok live campaign. By leveraging the resources of TikTok’s lifestyle service, they created an immersive “football adventure” live-streaming experience during 2022 FIFA World Cup that integrated gaming and rewards. By distributing benefits to live viewers through game challenges, they attracted traffic, increased live stream retention, and brought significant growth to the brand⁴.

4. Strengthening User Engagement

SMEs should also focus on interacting with users to enhance brand influence on social media. By responding to comments, engaging in private messaging, and hosting online activities, businesses can foster closer connections with their users. Additionally, collecting user feedback through surveys and polls can help businesses better understand customer needs and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly.

Amid the current wave of digital transformation, social media has become a crucial platform for SMEs to enhance their brand influence. SMEs need to precisely target their audience, create personalized content, and actively leverage emerging marketing models such as influencer live streaming. By adopting a multi-platform approach, they can achieve comprehensive improvements in brand influence. Only by keeping pace with the evolution of social media can SMEs stand out in the highly competitive market.

Future Prospects and Challenges

In the fiercely competitive market, enhancing brand influence is crucial for SMEs to achieve sustainable development. With the continuous evolution of social media, SMEs have vast opportunities to leverage these platforms to boost their brand influence. Innovative marketing models such as social commerce and live-streaming e-commerce are becoming increasingly popular, providing new opportunities for SME brand building. The application of technologies like artificial intelligence and big data enables SMEs to gain deeper insights into consumer needs and optimize their social media marketing strategies. According to data from the China Center for Internet Economy Research, the transaction scale of the live-streaming e-commerce industry expanded rapidly from 2017 to 2022, reaching 3.5 trillion yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 53%. By June 2023, the national live-streaming e-commerce transaction scale reached 2.0 trillion yuan, with significant participation from SMEs. Looking ahead, only by keeping up with the trends of the times and fully leveraging the power of social media marketing can SMEs establish a competitive edge and achieve long-term growth in the intense market competition.

However, SMEs also face numerous challenges in implementing social media strategies. Firstly, with increasing market competition and many brands vying for users’ attention, information overload makes it difficult for SME marketing messages to stand out. Secondly, rapid technological advancements require businesses to continually update their strategies to adapt to ever-changing consumer preferences, which poses a significant challenge for resource-constrained SMEs. Additionally, growing concerns over data privacy and security necessitate the careful handling of user data to maintain brand reputation and consumer trust.

The work described in this article was supported by InnoHK initiative, The Government of the HKSAR, and Laboratory for AI-Powered Financial Technologies (AIFT).
(AIFT strives but cannot guarantee the accuracy and reliability of the content, and will not be responsible for any loss or damage caused by any inaccuracy or omission.)

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