Social Media Branding and How to Use It
Brands are more than logos and cover photos – they are associated with your company and affects how customers feel. Often, the true value of a brand is overlooked and its potential missed out upon. By having a consistent approach across social media, you can enhance your social media branding. This will improve the way your brand is perceived, increase popularity and boost sales.
Brand consistency is very important but can be difficult to achieve, especially on social media. But, it’s not impossible. You need to have the same tone in any ads you’re using, your email marketing and on social media accounts. If you have a plan and keep to it consistently, you should be just fine.
In this guide, we’ll get into how to use social media branding to your company’s benefit. After reading everything we’ve got to say, you will be on the right track to improve your brand presence.
Have The Basics Covered
Make sure that your company’s logo, bio, handle, ‘About’ info and your colour palette are consistent. Consistency truly is key. When a customer sees your logo or the colour palette they should automatically associate it with your brand. When they notice your handle on social media, they should be able to connect it to your brand. All your social media accounts should have profiles that are similar. You can make little changes to be platform-appropriate, but the main theme should always be present.
All the most popular brands have profile pictures and banners on their accounts and websites that are similar. If the ‘Big Guys’ are doing it, you should too. Best of all, this doesn’t cost a thing, so you can make sure your basics are covered with no extra expenses.
To be certain you’re on the right track, perform an audit of your social media accounts. Check that banners, bios, logos etc. are consistent. Also, keep an eye on the content you share – it should align with your brand’s look and feel.
After you have ensured that you’ve got this basic consistency down, you can move on to more strategies. Just remember that most strategies are not ‘do once’ deals – as the world and consumers evolve, so should your marketing. This is especially true on social media.
Enhance Visual Branding
This is very important because people crave visual stimulation. We process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text, which means visual content is more popular than text.
If you want to cater to your audience – and you do – you have to make sure you give them pleasing visuals. And those visuals need to be used in such a way that it improves your social media branding.
Some of the most important things to consider are consistent (that word again) fonts and colours. If you’re sharing a video, the overlaying font must be familiar to the viewers. On your Instagram page, the colours or filters must be obviously linked to your brand’s appearance. Over time, your followers and customers will become used to the graphics and visual tools you use. This creates great brand recognition, something that you should strive for.
When creating Instagram stories, incorporate your brand’s colours, logo, slogan and whatever else you can. Make sure that it’s obvious that this story/post comes from your brand. You can apply this thinking to all your social media accounts.
To ensure that you get this right, it’s a good idea to have a visual ‘brand guide’ that displays fonts and colours used by your brand. Specific typography and palettes are a great way to get started. Use graphic templates that can be used across all platforms. Make use of photos and videos that reflect your brand’s look and feel. This will create a seamless feel when viewing all your content.
Social Media Branding – Nike Just Does It
Nike is a great example – it has a logo and slogan known across the globe. When you see that familiar checkmark, you think ‘Just do it’. Of course, getting this level of brand recognition takes time and dedication. But you can do it, just keep at it.
When you do social media branding correctly, you will optimally connect with your target market. Research indicated that the top goal of all brands that use social media is to grow awareness. Making use of good branding is a sure-fire way to do this.
Work On Your Marketing Personas
Although this can be a complex objective, you need to create personas that will add to your social media branding strategies. These personas will vary between the different social media networks you use. It is possible to use one persona across all platforms, but then you won’t get the best results.
Marketing personas should not focus on one particular person or stereotype but incorporate different representations. A persona should be aimed at representing parts of your target audience but not the whole thing. For the best results, brainstorm and come up with as many ideas as possible. Then you’ll have more to work with.
You could start with your customer base and then ‘map’ them to the various social networks that you use. Based on information about specific social media users – Twitter is used by more men and millennial parents for example – you can come up with relevant marketing strategies.
Chipotle’s Cheeky Social Media Branding Works
One example of using marketing personas in social media branding is Chipotle using memes and cheeky social media content. This is because they have successfully determined their marketing persona. The company is also very interactive, meaning their social media branding is focused on engagement.
Currently wearing Chipotle napkins for pants how’s your day going?
— Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) April 9, 2020
To have the most effective social media branding, consider creating more than one marketing persona for each of your social media accounts. Base these personas on researched demographics. Incorporate brand slogans and catchphrases as well as visuals and personality.
Establish Brand Tone and Voice
Once you’ve got your visuals and personas figured out, you need to make sure it all flows together naturally. Most importantly, make sure the tone and voice remain similar on all social media networks.
In general, social media accounts should be colourful and creative. In many cases, it’s okay to be snarky or sarcastic – within reason, of course. Just make sure that the overall tone and voice reflect and represents your brand accurately. You don’t want to confuse people and have them heading away from your company.
To keep things consistent, make sure that your marketers are aware of your social media branding. If necessary, create a guide that outlines even the smallest details, such as whether users are called ‘customers’ or ‘clients’, are made clear.
Will your brand be using humour or remain professional? Will trendy images and terms be used to reach a wider audience? These are all questions that your team should know the answer to. When your social media branding is uniform, it will make your company look better and reach more people.
Make Use of A Content Calendar
As we’ve been stressing throughout this guide, consistency can take good social media branding to great social media branding. There’s no use in having brilliant ideas and interesting personas without keeping things in harmony. Having a plan and sticking to it is as important as having a reliable service/selling a high-quality product.
You have to create long-term relationships with your audience and to do that, you need to be active and engaging. If you don’t, you’ll be forgotten and lost in the millions of social media profiles. Using a content calendar is the most effective way to make sure you stay on top of matters. For this, SocialPlanner is ideal.
This tool will help you discover content that your audience will want to read, share and talk about. It can assist in finding content from top social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and from your favourite sources, all in one place.
Ideally, you should have a basic schedule that looks at the very least like this:
- Facebook: A few updates a day
- Instagram: Once a day
- Twitter: Three tweets a day
- LinkedIn: Once a weekday
When you show your audience that you’re part of their world, they’ll want to support you and get interactive.
Incorporate User-Generated Content
Using user-generated content (also known as UGC) can boost a company’s brand awareness, brand loyalty and evoke a deeper sense of trust from customers. By incorporating this kind of content into your social media branding strategy, you can boost your sales greatly. You will also show customers and users that you appreciate their support, improving your relationship with the public.
UGC is like testimonials that are real and don’t feel forced or ‘bought’. It can only do your brand good to show off with the positive experiences of actual users. It is more effective than advertising and feels more sincere to people who view it.
Social Media Branding Pro Tip: Take Part in Communities and Groups
If you want organic engagement rates, consider creating groups and communities, or joining existing ones. This will create buzz around the content of your brand without you doing too much. You will be able to reach more people who are interested in what you offer.
In addition, people will feel more of a connection to your brand. They will feel that you actually care about them and their opinions and views. Of course, if you want to be a successful company, you will actually care. But when people know you care, they’re more likely to become loyal to your brand.
Use Twitter for better social media branding
Twitter is a great way to expand your social media marketing strategy. It allows you to become part of conversations and get deeply engaged. You can use hashtags to your brand’s advantage and gain many followers. Directly interacting on Twitter will go a long way to improving your brand awareness and loyalty. That is, if your target audience is to be found on this social media platform. Which brings us to our next point…
Avoid Platforms Unsuited to Your Audience
It would be best to avoid social media platforms where your target audience doesn’t hang out. If you want to pull in teenagers and young adults, Snapchat and Instagram would be ideal. But if you’re looking to gain professional supporters and customers, LinkedIn would be a much better option. Your approach to social media branding greatly depends on what you wish to achieve. Every brand will have a slightly different strategy, but by making use of the guidelines provided here, you are on the right road to successful marketing.
Offer More Than Expected
Granted, this can be challenging and would call for some serious outside the box thinking. Most social media users expect status updates and some level of interaction. But sending private messages that give away small freebies is a nice touch that not every brand offers. Reward your loyal followers by treating them a little special every once in a while. Offering perks and customised messaging go a long way to strengthening social media branding. If you approach your users with private massage making use of your brand’s slogans and colours (or anything else in your arsenal) you will make a lasting impression.
Don’t Stop Focusing on Your Social Media Branding
The work does not stop when you’ve established a good routine and started incorporating all the strategies and ideas you came up with. You need to keep an eye on your activity and the results of your hard work. You need to analyse the outcome of your efforts to keep your marketing insightful. This way, you’ll prevent spending time and effort on ideas that don’t work. Also, keep an eye on trends and opportunities – these could change and pop up when you least expect it.
Conclusion
To have a successful social media marketing strategy, you need to ensure that your activities make sense and help to create a clear brand identity. Social media branding may sound complicated, but once you have it down, it’s a wonderful way to improve your brand’s growth.
