Social media branding promotion is a powerful marketing tool. Let’s understand why it’s important, how to do it right, and techniques to enhance your social brand.
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Social Media Branding: Doing It Right
Do you remember the days when social media was considered “maybe” or optional for businesses? Were the most active brands on social media the early adopters and pioneers?
Well, those days are over.
Today, social media is a prerequisite for any business.
Your social profiles are often the first point of contact for customers with your organization—hence, social media is a powerful branding tool that can influence brand awareness, emotions, authority, and trust.
However, social media brand promotion doesn’t happen by chance; it requires careful planning, consistency, and long-term commitment.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore what social media branding is, why it’s important, how it’s done, and then share useful techniques to improve social media branding.
What Is Social Media Branding?
As usual, let’s start with a fundamental question: What exactly is social media branding?
The term is somewhat self-explanatory. It is the practice of using social media to convey your brand identity, mission, and information to existing and potential customers.
Just like you have an overall brand strategy for your organization, you should also have a strategy for your social media brand.
It should function as a part of your larger brand strategy and its extension, but certain areas will inevitably be different based on the unique factors of social media.
Brand Identity: How your brand is presented on social media platforms. Visual elements include logos, color palettes, fonts, and an overall visual approach.
Brand Voice: Your tone should be consistent with your brand values and information and should align with how you interact with your target audience. Customize it based on the social platform, but the core of your brand voice should feel consistent and recognizable.
Content Strategy: The content you share on social media plays a crucial role in your brand promotion. Developing a content strategy will help you define the types, formats, and themes of content that are most meaningful for your voice, tone, and information.
Audience Engagement: A good social brand involves interaction with the audience. Engage with them to cultivate emotional connections—ensuring that you do this in line with your brand tone and voice. Most importantly, consistency is key in social media brand promotion.
From your visual identity, voice, and tone to how you interact with your followers and the stories you tell, building a cohesive brand image that your audience can recognize and trust is crucial.
Why Is Your Social Media Brand Important?
As mentioned earlier, social media marketing is a fundamental component of effective marketing strategies, and brand promotion is the cornerstone of what you showcase on social media.
Think about how many times you’ve first encountered a brand on social media and “dug into” their profile before deciding whether to follow or visit their website.
Your social media image can significantly impact shaping perceptions and emotions about your brand, attracting and converting new customers, building brand loyalty, recruiting new employees, and ultimately boosting your bottom line.
However, it’s also a highly competitive landscape, and to stand out, you need to build your brand correctly.
Your customers (and potential customers) should be able to understand who your brand is, what your values are, what your information is, and why they should trust you—this can be achieved through social media branding.
A good, consistent social media brand is one of the most powerful tools for cultivating brand awareness and visibility, potentially making the difference between people choosing your brand over competitors.
It’s a key to effective social strategies and supports your larger marketing efforts.
How to Build Your Brand on Social Media
Building your brand on social media is a multi-faceted effort that requires you to consider many things.
Here are some basic steps to build your brand on social media:
Understand Your Audience for Social Media Branding
This might seem obvious, but understanding the ins and outs of who you’re talking to is the foundation of building a brand on social media. Strive to understand their demographics, interests, desires, and pain points, as this will help determine how you connect with them and the types of content you should create.
Outline Your Brand Identity
As discussed, you should have a clear and consistent visual identity on social media. Look for your existing brand materials to help build this, but feel free to make changes as needed. Your social brand should be tailored to the platform itself and the behaviors and preferences of social media users. It will also inform how vibrant your content is.
Find the Right Voice for Social Media Branding
How does your brand communicate with others? Is it friendly and casual? Is its tone more professional or formal? Does your brand use snark? Does it make jokes? Is it more focused on entertaining customers or informing them and providing education? These are questions you should ask yourself when defining your brand voice on social media. Once you’ve identified your ideal brand voice, make sure to incorporate it into everything you do on social media—from your content to your comments.
Choose Your Platforms Wisely for Social Media Branding
Your audience is unlikely to be highly active on every social media platform, especially considering how many platforms there are in today’s age. Think carefully about which platforms you want to leverage for your social media presence. Once you know where your audience is most active, ask yourself if the platform itself aligns with your brand values, story, identity, and voice.
Develop a Content Strategy for Social Media Branding
Based on your understanding of your audience’s interests and pain points, as well as your brand image and voice, create a plan for the types of content you’ll be producing. Ensure that each piece of content you create reflects the decisions and parameters you’ve set for your brand. I recommend experimenting with various content types and formats to keep things fresh and see what resonates with your audience.
Monitor and Adjust for Social Media Branding
When it comes to resonating with your audience, building your brand on social media is an ongoing process, so be sure to monitor your performance and reactions to your social media presence.
Continuously analyze metrics like engagement rates and more qualitative indicators like audience comments, and adjust your approach accordingly.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that a particular storytelling style resonates most with your audience, or that a certain brand font isn’t clear enough on social media.
Be sure to optimize your brand based on what works most effectively.
8 Techniques to Improve Social Media Branding
Now that we’ve covered the essentials, let’s delve into some techniques to improve social media branding.
Stay on Trend
Staying updated on the latest trends, formats, and features is crucial for effectively building a social media brand. Make sure you understand the latest algorithm changes and the content social audiences are interested in at any given time. By leveraging trends on social media, you can demonstrate to your audience that your brand is trustworthy, authoritative, and well-informed. Understanding how algorithms work ensures that people actually see your content and engage with your brand.
Humanize Your Brand
This is another piece of advice that sounds obvious but is often overlooked: tend to humanize your brand. Social media is a highly competitive and noisy space, and users are not interested in brands trying to sell them unrelated products that disrupt their experience. By showing a human side to your brand, you make it easier for customers to establish genuine connections with you. You can achieve this by commenting on trending topics, celebrating employee stories, showcasing behind-the-scenes content on social media, and even adjusting your tone to make it more conversational and natural.
Creating a Style Guide
As mentioned earlier, consistency is crucial in social media branding. This applies to every element, from visual effects to copy and tone.
A highly useful method to ensure consistency across the team is to create a social media style guide.
In your style guide, you can outline all the essential information about what to do and what not to do on social media. Examples of items you might include are preferred brand fonts, the brand color palette and how to use it, and words or terms to use and avoid.
Once you have the first version, share it with relevant team members to ensure everyone is on the same page. Continuously treat it as a dynamic document based on learning from your brand strategy and updates to key points.
Actively Engage with Your Network
The most engaging individuals are those who interact, ask questions, and build relationships with those around them—brands should do the same.
To enhance your social media brand, focus on improving your engagement and expanding your social network. There are many ways to achieve this.
Start with your audience, customers, and potential clients. Respond to their comments and questions, and actively engage with their content when relevant.
Similarly, identify influencers in your industry or niche market whose values align closely with your brand, and start engaging with them.
You can also participate in some interesting social interactions with other brands, although I generally do not encourage excessive interaction with your competitors.
Focus on Unique Storytelling
Great social media content, like all great marketing content, is about storytelling. Therefore, to strengthen your social media brand, focus on telling unique stories that only your brand can tell.
Try sharing content that highlights your company’s background story, mission, values, or the real people behind the brand.
Ensure the stories are authentic, as this resonates most effectively with social media audiences.
Optimize for Each Platform
As mentioned earlier, you might not appear on every social media platform—each platform has its own audience demographics, expectations, content types, and subtle differences.
By refining effective methods on each platform and optimizing your strategy accordingly, you will naturally elevate your social media brand.
For example, you might prefer to share more employee or company stories on LinkedIn, educational carousels or captivating images on Instagram, and focus on video storytelling on TikTok.
Whatever you decide, prioritize the platform and its audience, and success will follow.
Harness User-Generated Content (UGC)
Sometimes, the most powerful brand moments come not from your brand but from users.
User-generated content (UGC) is highly welcomed by brands on social media, and with good reason—it often holds more influence than your own brand. At the very least, it’s a powerful ally.
While telling your own story is essential, recommendations from real-life customers about your company and its products or services are an incredibly effective way to showcase your brand’s leadership, especially when their content aligns closely with your values and messaging.
Reevaluate Data
It always comes back to data.
If you want to improve your social media brand, you absolutely must spend time measuring where you are now, what’s effective, and what’s not.
You should regularly monitor your performance, but perhaps you need to take a bit more time to pause and dive deeper.
Consider A/B testing different visual or messaging approaches to see what truly works. Then, ask yourself if you need to reassess your brand and tone.
Handling this correctly is crucial, so don’t be afraid to take the time to ask the right questions.
In Conclusion
Social media branding is a crucial component of any marketing strategy—it’s not just about what you post, but much more.
Like your brand, your social media brand strategy should continually evolve to match the current landscape of your audience and industry.
By leveraging some of the techniques we’ve discussed—keeping a focus on your audience, maintaining clear brand identity and voice, and prioritizing consistency—you can enhance your social media brand and drive long-term success for your business.