Steps to Establish Your Brand on Social Media like a Pro
By John
Social media affords businesses a credible channel to connect with their customers, which presents a better way to build their brand!
The building of successful online business requires a formidable brand to scale through the several huddles of gaining traffic. While the task of having brand consistency across all social channels is key to effective marketing, but how do you ensure your contents are of similar tone across the different channels?
Also read: How to Drive Traffic to Your Online Store using Social Media
It’s so much easy to understand why businesses and marketers almost unanimously believe that social media presents crucial means to building a brand. But what are the most effective ways to build your brand through social media?
Here, we’ve compiled the necessary steps explaining how you can easily manage your brand on social media – from content creation to customers engagement, thereby helping you to build your business!
Introduction to Social Media branding
Social Media Branding involves the management of a company’s name, image, identity and position, across the digital networks.
It includes the creating of a positive image for your company, which is very crucial for success, especially if it is a local business. Nowadays, businesses are moving to a more online based model and having a positive brand standing is an important part of all online business.
In other words, this means you’d need a strong social media know-how to build an effective brand that deliver results.
Steps to Establish Your Brand on Social Media
So we present to you the 5 steps necessary to build a brand through social media, which steps if taken will help position your business for further growth.
1. Maintain Consistent Brand Identity
The importance of having a consistent identity for your brand across all social platforms, is mandatory to building a strong brand. Starting from your brand’s profile on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, to your company’s blog and anywhere else your business has a presence online.
While no one is gonna lecture you on the minute details of basic branding, but you do need to make sure that you have a consistent logo, brand color, company slogan, down to boilerplate and handle name. Though, many companies like to alter the logo styling for the different social networks depending on the allotted space, you should make sure that it is identifiable to your audiences.
The most important aspect is that your brand profiles have a common theme that people will easily recognize as your brand.
2. Develop Brand Personas
Personas are characters, which are often fictional, that you create based on your brand essence in order to represent the brand among the different user types that may use your service, or products.
Your brand personas are really necessary for marketing purposes, and may vary between the different social networks. For instance, audiences on LinkedIn are more business-minded individuals than audiences on say networks like Facebook and Instagram. The reality is that if you use the same persona across both networks, there’s a possibility that it would not resonate with the audience.
So, the best approach is to create different personas for marketing on the social networks. The creation of personas will help you to understand more about your users’ experiences, needs, behaviours and goals.
3. Have a Brand Voice
A brand voice or tone include details like company catchphrases, personality traits and hashtag vocabulary, even smallest items like use of the term “customers” or “clients” to help you keep your writing-style more professional.
If, for instance, your account is managed by multi-users, having a detailed guide for referencing to keep your team aligned to your company’s writing style is necessary.
Besides the visuals, and topic captions, the brand voice is the next important item for branding your social media posts. The social media accounts of prominent companies tend to have some personality, with some, been rather sarcastic or informal.
You can also have a brand voice for your other marketing purposes. And extending it to your brands social media channels, and cultivating specific approach by platform, is highly advisable.
4. Engage with Your Audience
You should focus on building a relationship with audience by interacting, conversing, engaging and caring, as those move alone can convert them to customers. And don’t just plug in your products or services promotions – broadcasting that is stale.
Get into genuine two-way communication, which is key to winning them over, because people need to inherently gain trust for your brand and that’ll take quite some time and a lot of efforts.
In the same vein, having a brand story or perhaps, the idea of behind a brand – as you brand can be more compelling by simply spinning a story about it. Always involve your customers in the brand story, as they will be the ones to engage with it.
5. Monitor Your Brand Mentions & Activity
Just as websites are monitored for traffic and conversions using Google Analytics, brands need to also treat social media with the same level of scrutiny.
There are quite a ton of tools available to help you identify the top-performing contents, trends and essentially break down your whole social media activities by the numbers.
It can help you to treat your social media channels more like a project with ROI, and less like guess work.
Sprout Social is an online tool that will give you overall trends for your brand across all of your networks, and the reports are easily customizable by date ranges, you’ll also be able to see how your brand is performing overtime.
Final Words!
Social media is a great tool to help you in increasing your brands online presence, but as more businesses have jumped on the bandwagon, the clutter makes it a little harder to compete.
But most certainly, you won’t be needing ages of social media branding to build a strong brand, but patience is mostly required. To stand a better chance, keep your customers engaged and interested by sticking to the above steps, and also set your goals on the path of ultimate improvements for your brand online.
If you need assistance, you can consult experts to involve in the process to building the required citation with your brand offerings, which will result a lot of patronage for your business and increase in customers’ confidence, traffic, and incredible boost to your online brand.