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Going Digital
Did you know that social media has been around for the last 40+ years? It sounds like the term ‘viral’ was coined just yesterday. Social media has been booming since a little over a decade ago when companies began using Facebook as a marketing tool. From the era of reliance on print ads and billboards, the world has now moved online; brands now connect with their customers online. Influencers and ‘pages’ are the new billboards; DMs are the new flyers. Every relevant brand or business these days has built a social media presence for itself to improve brand awareness, increase leads, and, in turn, sales.
What is social media branding?
Brands use social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to engage with their target audience, coming up with fresh ideas and content to interact with consumers, helping them build a network of followers and attracting newer audiences to check the brand out.
For brands looking to create an impact in the long run, social media branding is a huge yes.
How can you improve your social media branding?
You have social media but don’t think you’re justifying its use? Try improving your social media branding with these tips:
Know Your Business: Many brands fail to win the social media game because they don’t know their identity well. To succeed with your branding exercise, you must first know your business. What does your brand or business stand for? What defines it? How is it set apart from the crowd? What does your brand aim to achieve? What are its core values and mission statement? Put together your branding guidelines to create a clear brand identity. Once this clarity has been achieved, it will help you better communicate content through your social media.
Know Your Audience: The upside to social media is a vast audience; the downside is the audience. Why so? Many brands overlook that their content aims to attract people globally; therefore, they need to create content that appeals to their audience. They create content that is not in line with their audience’s problems, needs, or wants. This leads to their content being skipped. Focus on creating customer personas to understand your audience thoroughly, and then create content to specifically target this audience.
Know Your Content: Brands need to share the correct information online, in line with their values, mission, and vision. Remember, the content your brand shares has the power to make or break it, so it’s important to know what to talk about and how to portray it. For example, notice how most brands create personalised content around trending topics like #pridemonth. To depict inclusivity, most brands create content around the topic and use hashtags to get it to trend.
Know Your Design: Having branding guidelines in place solves this problem. Use consistent fonts, visuals, and imagery to depict your brand on social media. This helps create a consistent and powerful image among the audience and builds better brand recall. Visual content is much easier and more in vogue when it comes to processing information; so, create visual content in the form of static images and videos, but stick to the brand’s tonality and design.
Busting Popular Social Media Branding Myths
It is essential to understand what you should believe in and what myths you should avoid, which are as follows:
Your Brand Can Become Popular Overnight
While social media can make content go ‘viral’ and people and brands famous overnight, the chances of this happening are next to nothing. Does viral content have the capacity to bring your brand popularity overnight? Yes, your post can get many likes and comments – but does it mean instant popularity for your brand?
For the most part, it’s all about creating good content consistently. Instead of vying for immediate attention and instant gratification with a few likes or shares, focus on the bigger picture. Continue posting. This will help you consistently build a fanbase, gain brand loyalty over time, and help your brand create an archive of content. If you do manage to go viral, there’s nothing like it!
To Become Popular, Your Brand Has To Be on Every Social Media Channel
Social media channels offer brands different platforms and ways to help the content reach its target audience. Each channel has its focus – some rely on creating communities, others focus on creating video content. It depends on where your brand’s focus lies.
What is the direction that your brand is going in? Which social media channels does it deem fit to proceed with said direction?
Instead of creating a profile on every channel, choose the ones that work for your brand – after all, it’s not about which channels you use; it’s about how optimally you use each channel. For example, an interior design brand may spend more time on Instagram, Pinterest, or TikTok, but a B2B brand may not necessarily generate as many results if it focuses on these channels. Understand which channels your target audience uses and create content to fit such channels.
If You Don’t Have Thousands of Followers, It Isn’t Worth It
Another myth associated with social media branding is the follower count. While having a large fanbase or follower count pays off, a brand doesn’t need to have a certain number of followers to start seeing results, but use social media channels and leverage its potential to create stronger connections with the target audience. Instead of fretting over the follower count, create content that makes waves – once people start resonating with the content, it will automatically help you increase your followers.
Social Media Branding Strategies to Boost Your Business
Two tips to give your brand the edge it needs and stand out on social media are:
Leverage An Appropriate Platform: With many available social media platforms, choose the one that best resonates with your brand. Run a B2B business? Power the potential of LinkedIn. Run a digital marketing agency? Focus on Instagram.
Create Consistent Content & Post Often: Consistency goes a long way, especially in building brand recall. Create a content calendar and schedule to churn out content consistently and regularly. On social media, marketers also create content buckets with one kind of messaging to target one type of audience.
Conclusion
Your brand needs to find its voice so that it reflects the right persona and communicates with its target audience in the intended way. When developing your branding for social media, avoid doing what others are doing. Remember, the audience loves fresh content. Stick to your ideals and goals, and optimise keywords and search words to reach a wider audience.