In the era of Social media, branding has become a complicated challenge. Now it’s not just limited to logo, typography or colors, it’s the perception you create among people with dedicated efforts.
Social media allows your business to leapfrog traditional media and foster relationships directly with customers. If you engage them with great stories and connect with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community having consumers of similar interests.
Brands have invested lakhs to pursue this vision. Yet only few have generated quality consumer interest online.
The road towards successful branding on social media is rocky, and to help you tread this road we will give you an overview of Branding on Social Media and how to ace it?
Table of Contents
What is Social Media Branding?
Social media is important for businesses to build their brand. It plays an essential role for brands to build meaningful online connections with their audience. Businesses that utilize social media to engage with their consumers gain more positive responses about their brand.
Social media is crucial for building brands because it helps businesses connect with their audiences on a sincerer level. With the rise of social media, brands can communicate in real time with consumers and let their opinions and ideas be heard.
Branding on social media is all about consistently using the right methods to engage with your target audience and is also a natural part of a brand’s overall marketing efforts.
Some of the best social media platforms where branding is done are-
The primary objective of branding on social media is to boost brand awareness. It is also used to define what your brand stands for and attract prospects that may turn into customers.
Social media branding helps you get more relevant consumers into your sales funnel by forging trust with them.
If your game of social branding gets right, the rest of the sales process becomes more efficient.
Also Read: How to create Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategies in 2021?
Brand it the right way!
Though the key with any type of branding is consistency, you may want to ensure that you play your strengths, showcase your uniqueness and stay the course when it comes to what you are trying to convey through your brand.
Here are some fundamental practices to help you brand your social media well.
1. Choose Appropriate Social Media Platforms
When starting out to brand your business on social media, you are faced with two options – go wild and launch your brand across all platforms or be more strategic in your choosing the best ones.
There are many social media platforms that just don’t make sense for your goals. So it’s worthless to invest your valuable time and energy in them.
Instead, take time to analyze what social platforms your audience uses the most. For instance, if your brand is a B2B IT service provider, then LinkedIn is probably going to be one of the social media platforms relevant to your branding strategy. On the other hand, something such as Snapchat might not be.
Also Read: How to create Social media content calendar:
2. Understand Your Target Audience
While choosing the right social networks to focus on, you need to look where your target audience is likely to be. You can analyze this by building an ideal buyer/user persona.
Try to be as specific as possible. Define who they are, determine their interests, their occupation, their habits, age or gender (if necessary) etc. This will help you to get a better idea on where your target audience prefers to hang out online.
3. Keep Your Communication Consistent
Turns out, branding on social media isn’t difficult. With time you realize it is far more easy when you understand the essentiality of creating the right kind of messages – “consistently”.
Your target audience gets more involved with your brand when you consistently use visuals and text that matches your purpose. Users on social media can easily identify patterns or themes, so when you are consistent in your efforts- your brand gets recognized.
The longer this process is executed; the better results you will observe. Regardless at what stage your brand is on social media, you should be consistent with your communication right from the start.
When your communication is consistent over a period of time, it becomes easy to win the trust and build rapport with your audience.
At the start, you may have to test out various types of content and hashtags to see what works the best for your audience. This trial and error helps you to understand more their demands and less about your own potential to create good, relevant content.
It definitely takes time to get it suitable enough, but once you have identified what works and what don’t, you will find it simple to be consistent.
Also Read: 7 Tips on Building a Strong Presence of your Business on Instagram
4. Keep your Brand Identity Consistent
As aforementioned, the key is to keeping things consistent in your social media branding. Talking about consistency in terms of a visual identity perspective- you may want to use the same color palette on your various social media platforms.
Ensure your logo is interwoven throughout your messages on social media. Repeat signature patterns and themes. In terms of communication, regardless of the kind of content you’re posting, ensure that the message/wording are always on point as far as your brand goes.
5. Optimize Your Bio
Social media profiles hold a lot of importance because they help users put their business’s message across to their audience. They give them a chance to pitch social media users who’re interested in learning more.
If you also want your branding on social media to be perfect, try not to ignore the bio section of your profiles. Not having a suitable bio leaves your visitors clueless about who you are and what you do.
Chances are your business might be providing the best service or products, but what’s the use of being on social media if your profiles don’t reflect your values?
Also make sure you don’t add any nonsense text in your profiles. Many brands make the mistake of adding irrelevant stuff in their profiles that gives zero clarity about their business to users.
In a few words, you can choose your bio to describe the purpose of your business, to showcase the benefits or advantages of your company offerings in your profile description area, or add your brand’s tagline.
Ensure optimization of content of your profile with relevant keywords along with a action button to help people find you, contact you or get in touch.
You can also choose to showcase the benefits or advantages of your company offerings in your profile description area.
Make sure to optimize the content of your profile with relevant keywords along with a contact button to help people find and get in touch with you.
Configuring your profile bio might look like a simple step, but it goes a long way in making huge difference to your social media branding.
6. Your Voice Matters
What makes a brand “great’? Well, there are many essential elements that make it great, but ensuring your brand has a true personality is the most crucial factor.
Similar to a human personality, brand personality lays the groundwork for how consumers see your brand, what they can expect from it in the future and what purchasing your brand says about them to their friends and colleagues.
Having a brand personality which is attractive, recognizable and engaging to your target audience is the unforgettable guide to how you design your social media presence; determining where you go, what you say and when you say it.
7. Your Community Matters As Well
Social media as its name suggests, centers on relationships. All the different social networks out there represent various communities. As you begin branding on social media, you should try to build relations from the very first post. Focus on building an engaging brand by interacting genuinely with your community.
As you post content and get users’ reaction in form of comments or direct messages, be kind enough to respond. You should think about what kind of content draw ideas, feelings and opinions from users in form of comments.
8. Stay Honest and Transparent
Honesty and transparency in your brand messages go a long way in establishing your brand’s strong credibility.
Make sure to put it all out there. Your followers will actually appreciate you more if you stay transparent. If you make a blunder, admit it. If something goes out of track, explain why. The more straightforward you are, the more your followers will like your brand and what it stands for.
Promote your brand
Once your social media branding efforts are working fine, you’re posting consistently, interacting with followers, and solidifying your overall brand image; the next for you would be to promote your profiles. Ensure to add links to your social media profiles on your website. You must also try and think of some creative places/ways to promote your profile.
Track and Monitor Your Social Media Branding Efforts.
Analyze after campaign, how effective were they? Are your followers responding to you as per your desire? Are you noticing an increase in follower numbers? If not, then it might be the time to adjust your plan. To monitor your branding on social media efforts, you can keep track of keywords and hashtags that are related to your particular industry or sector.
Concluding Words.
No matter what your business’ niche is, you must keep in mind that consumers are more interested not in your product/services but your brand’s personality.
We’re not saying that you should not try to offer the best product possible; it’s just that it should not come at the expense of building and nurturing an engaging relationship with your followers.
If you need assistance in successfully establishing and improving your digital and social media presence, contact Sampark Infoways today.
