Introduction
Social media branding has become a powerful marketing tool for companies. Specifically, it can help you position your brand as unique and stand out from the crowd. When social media branding is done correctly, it can help you optimally connect to your target audience. Additionally, it helps you deliver your messaging and convert your audience into loyal customers. Ultimately, you’ll be easily recognizable to your audience and able to drive more business, leads, and sales.
According to a January 2022 report, social media users have passed the 4.62 billion mark.
Impressively, this figure is equal to 58.4% of the world’s total population. Thus, by creating a strong brand presence on social media, you can reach a broader audience. To create strong social media branding, you need to be clear on your branding goals.
Examples of brand goals include:
- Spreading awareness of your service
- Generating new leads
- Increasing sales
- Increasing customer loyalty
- Providing a proactive customer service
Social Media Branding: Key Steps
1. Define Your Brand Identity
To achieve social media branding success, you need to know your business. In other words, you need to define your brand identity. The clearer you are about your brand identity, the easier it will be to craft the right message.
To start, make sure to have a consistent logo, color palette, bio, boilerplate, and handle. Most importantly, ensure you showcase common attributes that people will recognize as your brand. Performing a social media audit across all of your accounts will help you achieve consistency.
2. Choose The Most Appropriate Social Network
The type of social network you use can make a big difference on social media. You want your social media progress to be in sync with the efforts you’re putting in. Being active on the wrong social network will get you poor results. To start, decide which social media accounts you are going to focus on.
There are many social media platforms out there that can help you reach out to your target audience. To start, test out each of these platforms to find out which goes with your brand’s overall objectives. For example, if you’re a B2B business, tap into the power of LinkedIn for building your brand.
However, if your business is more on the B2C or C2C side, get more active on Facebook or Instagram. Ultimately, every social media platform has an audience that is used to seeing a certain type of content. Consequently, decide on a social network that helps you achieve your branding goals.
3. Optimize Your Profile Bio
As a business, you should also implement social media SEO in your social media branding strategy. To start, add relevant information which will give clarity about your business. For instance, inform your visitors about who you are and what you do. For example, describe the purpose of your business in a few words. You can also showcase the benefits or advantages of your company’s offerings. Additionally, make sure to optimize the content of your profile with relevant keywords. Furthermore, don’t forget to include a contact button to help people find you and get in touch.
4. Extend Your Visual Branding
Visual identity is a codified system of visual elements that translates your brand into a distinct style. It includes a color palette, typography, illustration style, photo treatment, and more. Furthermore, it plays a crucial role in how your followers perceive your brand on social media. Hence, it’s important to ensure you have the same colors and fonts reflected in your images, graphics, and videos.
As a result, your branding should be instantly recognizable to your audience. To achieve this, create your brand style guide and include visual guidelines. Additionally, keep your brand’s aesthetic and color choices in mind to appeal to your target audience. Finally, be consistent with color across all media platforms, to ensure a unified and professional look.
In other words- maintain your brand’s visual identity across social media channels. Your LinkedIn followers probably have different interests than your Twitter followers. The demographics of core users may be different, too. Thus, remember to tailor your subject matter and tone to fit the user’s experience.
5. Create Relevant, High-Quality Content
Your content is the foundation of your social media success. Ultimately, it must inspire people to click, engage and share. Moreover, sharing the appropriate social media posts on each network is equally important as the steps above. As a result, creating strong content will help you capture a potential buyer’s attention. In fact, according to the statistics, you only have 2 seconds to capture their attention.
Hence, use this to your advantage. Moreover, figure out what content is going to connect best with your particular audience and publish it regularly. Whether you decide to focus on producing video content, memes, or written posts, make sure you’re branding yourself as a company with high-quality, relevant content.
6. Know Your Audience
A big part of social media branding is understanding and knowing your target audience. This allows you to take a precise, tailored approach with your marketing efforts. Besides knowing their demographics, it’s also important to detect their problems. Hence, if you want to help them, take a look at their problems, wants, and needs. Accordingly, you will be able to position yourself as the top solution to their problems.
7. Develop Your Marketing Personas
To make a successful social media branding strategy, include marketing personas in the process. Your marketing personas are going to vary between the networks. Accordingly, your content should differ across networks. That way it will resonate with your audience across social media platforms. Start with the company’s customer base and then map them to the different social media networks you use.
For example, your Instagram account targets small business owners while your LinkedIn targets big companies. Having these established personas per network helps you narrow down your content ideas and maybe even adjust your voice. After you have created your marketing personas, create content to match each of these personas.
8. Establish Your Brand Voice & Tone
Every brand has a personality that differentiates it from the others. This unique personality not only helps a brand connect with its target audience but also helps it build better relationships. Hence, your company’s social media accounts should showcase your brand’s personality. To start, you might already have a brand voice established for your other marketing focuses.
Extending that to social media, and cultivating a specific approach is highly recommended. Your voice and tone guide should include details like brand persona, company catchphrases, personality traits, and vocabulary. After developing your voice and tone guide, audit your social media posts to see where you can improve.
9. Keep Your Branding Consistent On All Platforms
Brand consistency across all marketing touchpoints is a challenge for every company. However, it’s important to focus on crafting the right kind of messages consistently for several reasons. First, people on social media are used to identifying patterns or themes. Consequently, your brand becomes more involved with your target audience when you regularly use visuals and text that match your purpose.
As a result, your social media channels will help your brand grow, given that your audience can rely on your consistency. In other words, you can expect an increase in sales, brand recognition, and overall engagement. Additionally, ensure your brand is consistent across all products, advertising, customer service, and packaging.
Your brand’s profile should be unified and in line with your brand identity anywhere it appears. Ultimately, aim to achieve consistency with graphics, color, style and language, and even post frequency. To start, identify the best social media metrics to focus on, analyze the data associated with your posts and identify a pattern that works.
10. Be Social
If you want to find success with social media branding, you need to be social. Social media is a conversation, so it needs to go both ways. When your follower tweets at you, tweet back! When someone leaves a question on your Facebook page, answer it! If someone comments on your Instagram post, comment back! Build your brand on social media around being social and engaging with your fans. The more you engage, the more your followers will also be engaged. The truth is, branding your social media takes some work. But if done right, it will help you foster valuable connections.
11. Join Social Media Groups
Facebook and LinkedIn both offer opportunities to join groups focused on specific industries or topics. To start, use the search bar on each network to find groups that are linked to your expertise. Next, share your insights in order to build authority around your brand.
Social media groups can help you:
- Generate ideas for your marketing
- Receive feedback
- Expand your skills
- Test your knowledge
- Develop leadership skills
- Gain referrals
- Help others
- Make friends
- Discover new opportunities
To gain the benefits above, engage and participate in discussions. Moreover, share your unique insights on a certain topic. Ultimately, showing that you’re responsive will help you build your brand in larger communities.
12. Measure The Impact Of Your Branding Efforts
Increasing your brand awareness across social media should be one of your goals. However, it will require a proper execution on your side. Additionally, it’s important to measure the result of every step you make. You can metric impacts by paying attention to engagement, mentions, and share of voice. Moreover, you can also use techniques like regular surveys of your audience. That way you can understand their level of brand recognition, track your overall reach, and measure brand perception.
Building An Effective Social Media Branding Strategy
Social media branding is a great tool to increase your online presence but also generate long-term business. When you get social branding right, the rest of the sales process becomes more efficient. Additionally, it will bring you increased brand recognition and help you foster genuine connections. However, social media branding can be challenging if you’re juggling multiple social media channels.
For instance, it requires managing and maintaining your company’s brand image consistently across platforms. Varying requirements on sizing, image content, and more can stretch your resources. Moreover, it can lead to inconsistencies if not properly maintained. Hence, consider working with a brand agency, especially if you require assistance regarding your visual strategy, brand identity, or improving your social media presence.