7 Steps of Social Media Branding: From Noob to Pro
By Lidiia Bondarenko
We are continually becoming a more “digital” society. According to McKinsey, nearly 20% of our population are true digital natives or, in other words, members of Generation Z. These are people born from 1995 to 2010 who since their earliest childhood have been exposed to the influence of the Internet, social media, and mobile devices. They used to build their lives simultaneously in the physical world and online. They dictate the main trends in modern digital space and, particularly, in digital marketing.
Your marketing is not true digital until it doesn’t meet the needs and wants of Generation Z. One of them is great social media branding. If you want to spread your brand word with wind speed, social networks are a great tool to do this. In this article, we’re going to outline 7 steps to brand your business on social channels.
Be consistent in your visual branding across different channels
Visual presence is the paramount thing in social media branding. You should pay special attention to your brand profile and cover images. Try to keep your brand logotype visible on both of them and keep them consistent on different social networks. If your social media profiles look like they are owned by different companies, it baffles people.
Keep your visual branding consistent everywhere, no matter which social network you’re using. You might notice that commercial giants use the same branding visuals across all social media profiles.
Let’s consider BMW. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - the brand is easily recognizable everywhere.
To be consistent on social media doesn't only mean to use the same profile and cover images. You should also follow the same style and post similar content on all the social networks. To make it easier you can employ social media post scheduling tools that will help you save time.
Don’t waste your bio
Your company bio on a social media profile is the first place where you can start telling a story of your brand. Many companies make a big mistake paying not enough attention to biography wording or missing this area at all.
Imagine, you enter a company profile. What do you see first? Right, these are a profile image with a logo and… a biography. The bio is the uber-important part of social media branding. It gives a brand an opportunity to say “hello” to its target audience at the same moment a person sees a social media profile.
The profile bio is the right place to show the brand’s values, goals, and main marketing messages in the possible shortest form. You might be surprised but you can encode the main brand’s objectives in a few hashtags in your bio. For instance, the famous sports brand Puma uses hashtag #ForeverFaster in its bio on Instagram profile. “Forever Faster” conveys the idea of Puma’s main mission to become the “fastest sports brand in the world”. Just two words, one hashtag, and a whole lot of braveness, motivation, and inspiration are encoded in this short brand bio.
Craft engaging visuals
If you want to level up your social media game you should create the truly engaging visuals. You are going to make a big mistake if you want to save money and don’t hire a professional photographer or designer. It’s almost impossible to create competitive visual content without their helping hands.
We are visual creatures. According to HubSpot, we perceive nearly 90% of the information visually. Now, you can easily imagine all the importance of the quality visual materials for your social media branding.
Try to make your product images and videos as sweet as possible. Invest in the right people, time, money, and other resources to make your product look pretty on social media. It’s worth it.
Every social network is a place where the information spreads faster than anywhere else. The more engaging your visuals, the sooner they will be shared across social networks.
Shape your company culture
Company culture is what makes your brand special for people. It is a big slice of the overall social media branding pie. Company culture is what your brand stands for, what your company is about, the way it communicates with people, and how it contributes to the world.
For example, Nike’s company culture is all about self-confidence and motivation to cope with the most incredible challenges. A simple hashtag #justdoit can tell about brand’s values even more than the whole paragraph of marketing text. All Nike’s social media content is saturated with the motivational slogans and visuals. It is what makes this company distinguishable among other sports brands and what dictates the style of Nike’s social media branding.
Claim your brand name
It’s not obligatory to be active on all social networks. You can concentrate your attention on a few of them that the best suit your brand content. It’s better to be excellent on three social channels, than to be good, but not great on seven.
However, you still need to be present on all social networks. Why? There are a few reasons for this. The first thing is that to have business profiles on all possible social networks is good for your company search engine optimization (SEO). Most of the social channels are interrelated and connected. So, it will be easier for people to find your company website even if they don’t search for it directly.
Moreover, when you create a company profile you are the first who uses this unique brand username, so it leaves no chance for anybody who wants to sell or resell their products under your brand image.
Cooperate with influencers
Maybe you’re not as famous as Nike or BMW, and your post will not get immediately the same engagement despite the great visuals and marketing message. But, big success always starts with the little wins.
Try to establish relationships with the influencers in your industry. Influencer marketing is a great way to market your brand when you have just started your success journey and when you are a big game player.
LaMetric’s collaboration with a tech influencer Unbox Therapy is a great example of successful influencer marketing on social media. In his engaging video on YouTube, Unbox Therapy reviews LaMetric smart clock and uncovers all its amazing features. This 5-minute video review got over 2 million views in the first few days. This collaboration brought big fruits for both the influencer and brand. We might just imagine the magnificent increase in connected clock sales that month.
Be honest with your audience on social media
You might be surprised, actually, honesty is the number one trend in social media marketing today. People love when a brand tells them the most secret things, inner issues, team jokes, real-life humorous stories, and challenges which a company faces when delivering services or creating products for its customers.
According to many surveys and researches, honesty is the first thing consumers wait to feel from their most-loved brands. To develop your brand voice on social media is much easier when you are honest with your target audience and open your company’s inner world. Each brand has its own unique ecosystem, but not everyone is brave enough to share such kind of information with the customers. Anyway, it’s a great opportunity to be distinguishable in the crowd of similar brands presented on social media.
To wrap it up
Marketer’s main mission is to connect a brand with its target audience, and social networks are the best way to do it. To level up a social media game, you should know how to make your company profile and social media content catch public attention and win consumers’ hearts. We hope the above-mentioned tips will help you brand yourself on social channels and increase your business ROI in the immediate future.
About the Author: Lidiia Bondarenko is PR and outreach specialist at PromoRepublic, that provides a tool for social media post scheduling. Her professional experience encompasses social media marketing and SEO. Her free time she spends searching for new marketing trends and tv shows and practicing yoga. Follow her on Twitter.
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