Social media is an integral part of online branding and marketing efforts. There are 4.9 billion social media users. If you showcase your branding to just a fraction of that number, you can get a lot of people to see your brand in the way you want them to.
However, social media branding requires careful thought and conscious effort. You need to have a foolproof strategy to achieve your social media branding goals.
But don’t worry. Here are social media branding tips you can follow for the best results:
Know Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience will ensure that your social media branding strategy is more effective. After all, when you know your target audience, you can tailor your social media content, among other things, according to their preferences. When they consume your content enough, you can get them to associate your brand with your chosen values and traits.
Really knowing your target audience involves knowing four things:
- Who they are – Gender, demography, marital status, etc.
- Where they are – Geography
- What they like – preferences
- What they want – needs, challenges
You can get this information by observing their behavior on social media channels, if you already have these. If you’re just starting out on social media, ask your marketing team for information. You can also ask your target audience directly through surveys.
Once you have all this data, create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target audience. The more detailed your buyer persona, the better. It can guide you as you go about your social media branding.
Set Your Branding Objectives and Goals
Your brand objectives and goals are what you want to achieve with your branding effort. They should be as precise as possible and be in line with your overall business goals.
When defining your branding objectives, start with broad goals and narrow them down into more specific and measurable objectives. For example, you can have broad branding goals like these:
- Increase brand authority
- Enhance brand reputation
Then break them down into actionable branding objectives like:
- Increase social media brand mentions by X in Y months
- Reduce negative brand mentions on social media by X% in Y months
Remember that your branding goals and objectives should also be realistic. Don’t aim to increase social media brand mentions by 2,000 in one week, for instance. Ask any experienced marketer and they’ll probably tell you that’s almost impossible.
Define Your Brand Voice
Your brand voice refers to the tone and style with which you communicate with your target audience. It’s part of your brand identity that influences how easily you connect with your audience over time. If you’re an established brand, you should have your brand voice already. If you’re just starting, you’ll need to choose one based on how you want your audience to perceive you. Let’s assume you’re this second one.
Your brand voice can be authoritative, professional, playful, casual, inspirational, or authoritative. It should reflect your brand’s personality. This is a set of human characteristics that people associate with your brand.
To determine your brand personality, pick the values that resonate the most with your business. Is it elegance? Or maybe it’s innovation and creativity?
Jenifer Aaker’s brand personality framework shows the different types of personalities a business can have and their corresponding brand voices:
- Sincerity – Brands in this category are perceived as genuine, reliable, trustworthy, and wholesome. The brand voice here would naturally be positive and inspiring. Examples are brands like Hallmark and Amazon.
- Excitement – brands are perceived as spirited, inspiring, and imaginative. These brands would typically have a bold, adventurous, or humorous communication style. Think of brands like Red Bull, Coca-Cola, or Nike.
- Competence – brands here exhibit traits of reliability and efficiency. Their brand voice will typically be formal. An example is Microsoft.
- Sophistication – brands are perceived as glamorous and elegant. This is a common trait found in luxury brands. The brand voice here will be emotional, exclusive, bold, or prideful. Examples include Rolex and Tiffany
- Ruggedness – brands are perceived as durable and tough. Here, you’ll have a bold and confident brand voice. Examples include Timberland and Harley Davidson.
Take your pick from these traits. Don’t worry. Your brand can have more than one. Then combine all these corresponding voices until you come up with the one voice that embodies your values and appeals to your target audience.
Perform a Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis will help you position your brand more strategically. A critical competitive analysis allows you to observe your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to branding. In the end, then, you can identify golden opportunities to take advantage of.
Here are some steps to take when performing a competitive analysis as part of your social media branding strategy:
- Identify your competitors. A Google search for brands offering the same products and services you do will get the job done. From the results, you can select the major competitors you want to analyze.
- Analyze their social presence. Which social media platforms are they on? What type of content do they share? Do they post infographics and videos? Or maybe their focus is on promotional posts? How do they communicate with their social media audience? Do they use a fun or a formal voice?
- Analyze their reputation. You can use social media listening tools for this. Ask yourself what you can learn from your competitors based on what customers are saying about them. Do social media users like your competitors’ promotional posts? Or are they getting a backlash for them? Do they like that they use a lot of technical jargon in their social media content?
Use your competitive research findings to create a social media branding strategy that will make you stand out. For instance, if you find many users don’t particularly love your competitor’s formal and technical language, then you’ll want to shun that and use a casual language in your social media content instead.
Develop Your Social Media Content Strategy
Your social media content strategy is a well-detailed plan that determines what you share and post on your social networks. This should be based on your audience’s preferences, branding objectives, brand voice, and competitive analysis findings. Remember, you want your audience to perceive you in a specific way. So, you need to curate your social media content and other elements to achieve that.
You can write your social media content strategy from scratch or use templates online. Whichever strategy you choose, you’ll need to incorporate the following elements:
Social Media Platforms to Be Used
Your choice of social media platform should depend on where your target audience is. What’s the use of your branding if no one can see it in the first place. So, go back to your audience persona and see which platforms they use.
Base your decision on which platform to use on how you want to be perceived as a brand as well.
For instance, if you want to be seen as an authority, LinkedIn might be a great platform for you. It comes with features that allow you to create authoritative content (LinkedIn blog post). Plus, it’s the top platform for professionals, with its over 930 million users. If you prefer to be seen as a fun and quirky brand, why not consider TikTok? TikTok is known for its entertaining content such as dance challenges. The platform also allows duets and has filters that can transform boring visuals into fun and quirky ones.
Your competitive research findings can also help you decide the social media platform to use for your branding.
Types of Content
Your content strategy should indicate which types of content you’ll post on your social channel. It should also define your content themes—-will your content types be educational, promotional, entertaining, etc?
The answers to those questions will ultimately depend on your brand personality. Let’s say you decided you’d emphasize “competence” as a brand. Your social media content strategy should then include infographics and educational posts. It should also specify you’ll write them in an easy-to-understand language. If you’re more of a fun brand, then TikTok videos and funny Tweets should probably be included in your content arsenal. Your language should be more casual and entertaining than formal.
When deciding what content to create, make sure you also consider what your target audience wants. This is where your audience persona, again, comes in handy. You can also check research on audience’s general preferences.
For example, a survey reported by Hubspot showed that consumers unfollow brands that share many promotional posts. So, if you want your branding to be effective, in general, your content strategy shouldn’t include many promotional social posts. These content types won’t be consumed by your audience in the first place.
Social Media Posting Schedule
Include your social media posting schedule in your social media content strategy, too. The key to branding is consistency. You want to bombard your target audience with enough content on social media so that they’ll easily associate your chosen values with your brand. Don’t worry if you don’t have enough human resources to create that many posts. Nowadays, you can easily create AI in SEO content that yields excellent results.
Note that each social network has recommended posting times. Post at these times first. Once you have enough social media data on engagement, you can determine the specific posting times for your business.
Of course, you also want to make sure you have enough social media followers who will see your branding, too. So, craft strategies for getting more followers on Instagram and for increasing the number of your Facebook friends as well.
Budget
Your budget will determine how well you implement your social media branding strategy. So, in creating your social media budget, pay attention to every detail. Determine the costs associated with content creation, your social team, and the cost of paid social media tools, for example.
You can either have a fixed budget or paid budget.
The fixed budget works if you want to save costs in your social branding efforts. You calculate your budget for a year or quarter, then allocate the same amount of money each month.
The paid budget (or zero budget), as the name implies, starts with a zero balance. As social media needs arise, a specific budget is created for it.
Whichever type of budget you choose, note that it should be revisited and revised regularly to accommodate new branding demands.
Implement and Monitor Social Media Branding Strategy
Finally, it’s time to implement your branding strategy. Roll out the content on your chosen social platform as planned using that set language that reflects your brand personality. Then monitor how your brand is doing in terms of meeting your branding goals and objectives. This way, you can make the necessary adjustments if needed.
For instance, if your branding goal was to be seen as an authority on social media, you might want to check how many brand social media mentions you got using listening tools. Does the number meet the numerical goal you set beforehand? If it doesn’t, then maybe you need to post more infographics, tutorials, and how-to content.
You also want to look at other critical branding social media data during your monitoring. For instance, when do your posts get the best engagement? What posts perform the best? You can’t get people to associate your brand with your specific values and personality if they don’t consume your social media content in the first place.
As part of your monitoring, you might want to send surveys to your audience, too. Ask them directly how they perceive you as a brand based on what they see on your social media. Then see if their answers reflect what you set out to achieve in the first place.
Here’s another pro tip: For the best branding results, you’ll want to communicate with your audience in the same way across your other marketing channels. So, if you use a fun language and quirky visuals on your social media, use the same on your website, flyers, and brochures. If you’re a more formal brand that uses straightforward language with a serious tone, make sure it also shows when your consumers find you elsewhere.
The rationale behind this is the same as what I mentioned before: the more you expose your target audience to the type of brand you want to be, the more they’ll believe you’re that type of brand.
Besides, if you communicate with your audience in different ways, they might think you’re a brand that has no clear sense of identity.
Conclusion
Social media branding helps you stand out in a crowded market. But you need to do this the right way. Social media branding goes beyond showing up and posting a few times a week.
You learned foolproof tips to follow when creating an outstanding SM branding strategy.
Know your target audience and set your branding objectives and goals. Define your brand voice and personality, too. You should also look at your competitors to find branding practices you might want to emulate or shun. Don’t forget to develop your social media strategy based on your research. Finally, implement and monitor your social media branding strategy.
Follow these tips and you can be whatever you want in the eyes of consumers.
