Social media is no longer just a place to connect with your friends and family, and it has now turned into an extension of the natural world and, as such, a place for businesses to show themselves and advertise. If it were a place in the real world, we could say it is overpopulated due to all the thousands, if not millions, of businesses and customers on social media. That is why it is hugely important to stand out from the crowd, and how do you do that? You use branding to connect with your customers.
Because marketing is no longer about letting the prospect know about your great product or service, it is about differentiating yourself from the competition by showcasing your brand identity, story, values, and mission, more so than your products. And with the thousands of new companies popping up every day, there is a vast need to stand out by having the right branding strategy.
Before joining in and jumping into social media with your business, you need to make sure you have a brand. Not a company, not a product, not a service, but a brand. Here we will give you some examples of using social media branding. However, if your business still doesn’t have a brand identity, it’s time for you to hire a relevant San Francisco brand agency and get your unique voice in this harsh market environment.
Why Having a Branding Strategy for Social Media is a Must?
As we said before, your brand is something more meaningful and powerful than your logo, product, or service. It is the intangible behind your company: mission, purpose, origin. Your brand is so powerful that you provoke an emotional response rather than just aiming to prove your product is good. This will help you connect with them at a much more profound level than “This product works better than the competition” will ever do.
This emotional response to your brand creates familiarity, trust, and loyalty, translating to better sales.
Having a good branding strategy will:
● Differentiate you from the competition.
● Make you recognizable.
● Help you have a clear marketing strategy.
● Improve retention and loyalty of your customers.
● Help you define your brand purpose.
Additionally, having a clear brand identity and branding strategy makes it easier for your customers to recognize you no matter on which platform they find you. And this consistency applies to your presence and marketing strategy on other offline media too.
Social Media Branding in a Nutshell
Having a social media branding strategy will help you be more consistent with how you present your brand. Allowing you to better communicate with your customers across the different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Linked In, and others.
It is crucial always to present your brand’s true identity but remembering that each platform engages differently with different audiences. For example, TikTok and Instagram are much more visual for younger generations, while Twitter and Facebook rely more on the text and are for older generations. Linkedin is much more severe and professional than some of the others.
Here are six strategies to help you ensure your branding is consistent across social media platforms.
Outline your goals
To engage with your audience in a meaningful way, you must understand what you are trying to aim for. Otherwise, it will be very obvious to people that you are just pushing content out for the sake of posting something but not with a defined aim.
Understanding your brand objectives and what you are trying to achieve in the long run will help you create engaging content for your customers and prospects.
Before starting a social media branding campaign, you should think about these three things:
● Define the values that your brand represents.
● Understand what the differentiating factor between you and the competition is.
● Research social media demographics and decide which platform works best for you and your ideal audience.
Cover the Basics
Social media, even Twitter and Facebook, rely a lot on the consistency of the visual look for your brand. This means having a properly thought-out logo, profile bio, color palette, etc., that represent your brand and are identifiable and consistent across platforms. Of course, some little editing and changes will have the way you present them according to each forum, but generally, you should have these visuals pretty done before you start.
Additionally, non-visual things like the tone and nuance of your posts or even the scheduling for posting should be consistent so that your followers, customers, or prospects can easily recognize you and start to connect with your brand.
Pay Attention to the Visual Side
Having a logo and a specific color palette is not where your brand’s visual identity will stop. Things like the filter you use for your pictures. The style of graphs. The text fonts and even the speed of your videos should all be consistent across platforms. With time, keeping this consistency will help you achieve the ultimate goal of social media branding: customers who can recognize your content without seeing your social media handle or even your logo.
Understand Your Audience
As we said before, not all social media are created equal. There will be demographic differences that will require you to use different ways of engaging with the users, sometimes even various topics of posts or ‘language.’
Not only will your target audience vary across social networks, but so will your aims on each social media. Maybe you want to create sales leads in one platform while building brand awareness in another. Creating multiple marketing personas for platforms will help you adjust your voice accordingly.
Create A Marketing Persona That Customers Will Love
Sometimes we forget that we care about the price or the pretty pictures; we also care about the people behind it. You can create a sense of ‘human-ness’ in your brand by using sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, funny, or informative copy on your captions and posts. This will allow your customers to create an even more profound connection with your brand.
Additionally, once you have created such a persona, make sure that if you have a large social media team, they are all aware of this by having a writing guide or branding guide. These guides will help them understand how to properly use language, humor, or sarcasm to share their brand’s voice.
Adapt and Learn
Although measuring your success on social media is not as easy as checking your number of followers or the rise in sales, it is still vital to check some essential metrics.
Thankfully most social media platforms will have an analytics page in which you can check the number of views, clicks, responses, shares, comments, and so forth of your posts, stories, videos, and more.
Taking this information to see what’s working for your brand and what changes need to be done is essential to stay on the game. As with everything on the internet, things change quickly, and you might need to adapt more often and quicker than you first expected. Always keep in mind that building brand recognition takes time and a lot of patience.
By keeping in mind these six strategies, you’ll be able to have an authentic and strong brand image on social media. But remember that expert skills are invaluable, and if you need the help of a professional branding marketing agency, you might have to take it.
