Creating and Maintaining a Social Media Branding Strategy

In the modern business world, building a strong online presence is one of the best ways to spread awareness about your endeavor.

By establishing a social media presence, you will bring more attention to your business and encourage customer trust and loyalty. Social media platforms provide an excellent environment to do just that.

Every like, share, tweet and comment will increase your brand’s exposure and bring more focus to your business. This will not only result in greater outreach, but it will also put your business ahead of your competition.

And since social media, as such, is not limited to any particular location – yet it can be used in that way as well – it provides a great means for reaching the global audience.

That being said, let’s see how businesses can brand themselves on social media platforms and come up with viable strategies that will help them promote their brands further.

Create a brand

Naturally, the first thing you’ll need to take care of when looking to create a strong social media branding strategy is creating a brand.

The main difference between a business and a brand is that brands infuse their core philosophy into everything they are doing. In order to take your business a step further and make a brand of it, you will need to come up with a unique brand name, create your logo, decide on the color palette, choose a font and define your core brand values.

Keep in mind that all of these aspects of branding a business will help your brand become more easily recognizable by your audience.

No matter the part of the world you’re in, seeing a white bottle on a red background will instantly bring Coca-Cola in mind, and the big curved letter M will have you craving for some Big Mac.

Naturally, you should strive towards achieving the same recognition by keeping your brand image unique and consistent online. The best way to ensure this is to rely on a reputable custom web design company to help you out.

Develop marketing personas

Once you create your brand, you should move onto developing your marketing personas. With so many social media platforms out there, it’s only natural that your marketing personas should resonate with the marketing style of their respective platforms.

What this means is that your LinkedIn marketing persona will need to be different from your TikTok marketing persona, yet both of them need to spread the same message.

Additionally, you also need to learn more about your audiences across various platforms so that you can cater your promotional efforts to those particular audience’s needs.

And naturally, make sure that the content you create matches both the persona and the platform you’re using to promote your brand.

Decide on your brand voice and tone

Every business social media account needs to decide on the voice and tone they will be using in their marketing efforts. Needless to say, you should do the same. Depending on the industry your brand is operating in, there will be a multitude of tones and voices you can choose from.

However, make sure that the voice and tone you opt for don’t only match your industry but also the platform and the audience you’re trying to reach.

For instance, if you are trying to sell fidget spinners to teenagers on Facebook, don’t go for a voice and tone that are too serious or “adult-like” but instead opt for something that better matches your audience.

Create multiple accounts

Since there are numerous social media platforms, you will naturally need to create multiple social media accounts. But you can also take things a step further and create multiple accounts on the same social media platforms.

Depending on the type of products or services you’re offering, you can choose to create an account for each individual category. Alternatively, you can make location-specific accounts that will help you connect better with the audience in that particular area.

For instance, people looking for web developers in Huston are far more likely to visit such specific pages than look for web developers from all over the world. Creating a location-specific account is a great idea for Facebook promotion, in particular, as Facebook itself already offers location features to its users.

Update your social media accounts

Consistency is a very crucial part in running a successful social media branding strategy. That’s why you need to make sure you stay consistent with all of your marketing efforts.

But the thing that some businesses fail to realize is that this doesn’t only apply to their current content but to their previous content as well.

That’s why you need to make sure you go over all of your social media accounts and update them to match your brand and the message it is trying to spread.

Aside from updating your profile pictures with your brand logo and ensuring that all of your pages are visually compatible with your brand, you also need to remove any of your previous posts that no longer necessarily comply with your new professional image.

Identify your area of expertise

As a leader in your industry, you will need to identify your area of expertise. This can be anything from your extensive knowledge about a particular – relevant – topic, to being able to predict the type of content that will best resonate with your audience.

Whichever your strong points are, you need to identify them and use them in your marketing efforts. Not only will this help you establish yourself as an authority even further, but it will also positively influence your brand reputation.

Create content on a regular basis

When social media first became a thing and businesses started using it to advertise their endeavors, the more posts you managed to create, the more engagement you could expect. However, nowadays, things are a bit different.

Over-posting today will only lead to your audience becoming increasingly annoyed with your brand. That’s why every brand that uses social media for promotion needs to find the perfect balance between creating regular posts and not overwhelming their audience.

Keep engagement in mind

Naturally, the more interesting and engaging your posts are, the more traffic you can expect to get. So aside from making and sharing your unique content, you should also share relevant content from other brands in your industry.

Cross-promotion will help you reach an entirely new audience and thus significantly expand your potential customer base.

Moreover, you can choose to share some personal information from time to time, such as your hobbies or travel experiences.

Since social media focuses heavily on individuals and their experiences, sharing such tidbits about your personal life will help your audience connect with your brand on a more personal level.

Import your contacts

While you probably already have a significant following on your social media pages, chances are you are not yet connected with all the people you know. For instance, a person may be following your brand on LinkedIn, but you’re not yet connected on Facebook.

So, what you can do is import all of your contacts from your mailing list or your phonebook into your social media accounts. That way, you can easily spot how many contacts you have and how many of them you still need to reach out to.

Keep things positive

The things you decide to post on your social media accounts and the tone of voice you decide to go with will greatly affect the way in which your brand is perceived. That’s why it’s always best to try and keep things positive as much as possible.

Avoid using inflammatory terms, and don’t engage in any religious or political debates with your audience. That way, you’ll eliminate the risk of potentially losing customers due to the fact that some of their personal views don’t necessarily align with yours.

Build authority through groups

Finding, joining and posting in various industry or niche-specific groups will help you establish your brand as an industry professional. These groups will enable you to establish your brand as an authority in the industry and allow you to reach an audience that still may not be aware of your business.

However, keep in mind that there are high chances you’ll come across your competitors in such groups as well. In case that happens, make sure you remain professional and respectful when interacting with them, even if it happens that you’re not being met with the same treatment.

Reach out to influencers

In the end, reaching out to influencers and collaborating with them is another great way to boost awareness about your brand. However, this will require meticulous research and a careful approach.

Ideally, you first need to make sure that the influencers you reach out to are relevant to your industry and are a good match for your brand. After that, you need to make sure that they are not involved in any controversies and scandals, to avoid actually damaging your brand image instead of enhancing it.

To sum up

Creating a brand on social media and successfully managing your social media branding strategy is not easy. It will require a lot of thought and meticulous research and preparation in order to be able to execute it correctly. You can also take help of top social media marketing tools to start your campaign in a right way.

But if you make sure you do your due diligence, you can expect a lot of positive things to come your way.

Author bio

Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for DigitalStrategyOne.

Social Media Marketing