If you are not using social media for branding purposes, you are wasting a big opportunity to build an authoritative brand and make it well-known among target audiences. With nearly three billion users, social networks help businesses to interact with their fans and build long-term relationships with potential customers.
But it’s not a simple process because you have to approach the job strategically and craft a sustainable branding plan. Our goal is to give you a hand here, so keep reading to learn five strategies for branding your business through social media.
Practical Tips to Build a Brand Using Social Networks
By definition, social media branding is the act of managing your company’s image, identity, and market position across digital networks. Although it sounds complicated, you can make the job a lot simpler by using a few practical branding strategies. Without further ado, let’s check out the 5 most important social branding features.
Ensure branding consistency
No matter what you do for a living, your business must have a well-defined branding strategy in place. The first rule of branding through social media is to respect the overall strategy and make it perfectly aligned with the general branding guidelines. This means that you should choose a color pallet, fonts, and ways of communicating with the audience before creating a website and your social media campaigns.
According to the report, brands with consistent branding expect to earn 23% more annual revenue than the brands that are inconsistent. This basically means you ought to take care of all the details and make them fit the entire branding concept of your company.
How can you do it?
First of all, you should use a logo as a profile image on all social media platforms. A logo is like a visual ID of your business, so it needs to be the first thing users see when they check out your social media accounts.
Jake Gardner, an assignment help expert at professional writing services, says the second feature is to stick to the usual color schemes, visual components, and templates: “If customers already recognize the business by unique colors, why would you change it on social networks?”
And thirdly, a brand must rely on the same style of content design and the same tone of communication. It is the only way to build a trustworthy brand personality that remains the same across all channels of communication.
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Ensure content consistency
A business is not only supposed to be consistent branding-wise but also in terms of the content published online and on social media. What does it mean?
The main idea is to publish lots of high-quality content. If I plan to write my thesis, I want to make it perfect. The same logic applies to your social media posts.
After all, people use social media because they want to consume interesting and educational posts, so you cannot afford to publish subpar content. Do your best to make it appealing, funny, entertaining, and relevant to the target audience.
Another thing you should keep an eye on is to achieve publishing consistency. This is a very important rule because the audience will forget you if you don’t post fresh content regularly. The easiest way to deal with this issue is to design a content creation calendar and plan your posts well in advance.
Customize content to suit each network individually
Even though consistency plays a major role in social media branding, you are not supposed to treat each platform the same. On the contrary, every platform has its own peculiarities that you have to keep an eye on before sharing new posts.
Before we briefly discuss the specificities of the most popular networks, we also need to mention that you don’t have to utilize every social media currently available. It’s enough to use three or four platforms that really mean something to the target audience, so make sure to choose your channels accordingly. For example, this is how you should approach different options:
- Facebook is a versatile community and you should definitely use it to publish all types of content
- Instagram is growing steadily and it represents an ideal solution for product-oriented brands
- LinkedIn is a good option for B2B companies targeting business owners and senior-level managers
- Twitter is the best choice if you have a lot of fresh news to share daily
- YouTube is popular among marketers who focus on “how-to” content
Promote two-way communication
What is the simplest way to establish long-lasting relationships with your audience and make them remember the brand for good? The answer is easy – you can do it through the promotion of two-way communication.
Social platforms are a modern communication channel where you cannot behave like an autocrat. On the contrary, you need to be open to conversations and exploit the opportunity to engage with potential purchasers.
There are so many ways to do it successfully – organize social media contests, ask questions in your posts, answer users’ comments, re-share their posts dedicated to your brand, and so on.
The only thing that matters is to react on time and keep the conversations as natural and casual as possible. It will make the brand look more human and help you to leave a nice impression on your followers.
Partner with influencers
Social media influencers have become one of the most popular figures of the 21st century. You should make the phenomenon work to your advantage simply by partnering with relevant niche authorities. There are two basic types of influencers:
- Micro-influencers have a smaller reach (up to 50 thousand followers), but they keep the audience highly engaged.
- Macro-influencers usually cannot convince a large portion of their fans to act according to their suggestions, but they can do miracles for brand awareness thanks to global popularity.
The best solution is to combine the two tactics and work with both micro- and macro-influencers when needed. It will help the brand to grow in popularity and also improve your professional authority.
Up to You
Social networks are a powerful brand-building tool, but you need to use them carefully in order to make the most of your content creation actions. In this post, we discussed five strategies for branding your business through social media.
Keep our ideas in mind, but feel free to write a comment if you have other interesting tips to share with our readers – we would love to hear your opinion about this exciting topic!
