Branding is about creating a unique identity. It is not just about the logo or the cover image that you place up there on your profile. It is less material and more perceptive of the value that it creates. It is about creating consistent communication resources, perception value, and engagement roles through strategically built content and interface assets across all market touchpoints. This involves more of how your user feels about your business and your presence.
When we talk about branding on social media, it is about how you let them perceive about your business or services through your profile, presentation, and communication on digital channels. It is a bit different here and you have to go by certain standards and characteristics of the digital order while you design and execute your brand presence through these networks.
There are a few practices and approaches that you need to check out here to make sure you do this well across different platforms, best serving their user bases and the purpose of a digital forum or network they cater. All put up together to serve as actionable strategies for branding on social media.
While you create your profile on different social media platforms, its important that you keep the design resources and content assets aligned with the central strategy and present them as one co-existing unit.
So, be purposeful and consistent in the way you present your logo, font styles, color palettes, presentation scheme, bios and boilerplates, and the tone and pattern of communication. While working on your communication plan and presenting your services to your users through these platforms make sure your profiles have the common thread of identity and context that your users can connect with seamlessly.
A slight gap or variance here can get you to confuse your users and let you lose the impact with which you build a purposeful identity and image as a business. So, do behave as per the requirement of a particular network and respond to a platform’s purpose of communication but don’t give up on your elemental role, trait, and vibe as a brand.
Action steps:
Do social media audit of all social media accounts.
Command consistency across contents, designs, and posting cadences.
Unify your look and feel across channels.
Now as you have consistent profile content across network accounts you need to take that further to help you with a consistent visual brand image. This consistency should reflect in your images, design elements, themes, graphics, and the overall visual presentation of your social media profiles. With every post that goes across and is shared with users, it should have the feel of the same set of traits and wits that are served with the common grain of identity.
And visuals allow you to do this much better than words. So, work on design materials and creatives to bring out that brand image of yours that binds your idea and purpose of communication and service into one focused and distinguishable entity to distinctively impact and register in the memory of your audiences.
Action steps:
Identify and define your brand’s color scheme, aesthetic value, and presentation traits.
Follow a visual style guide.
Create graphic templates serving each series of communication.
You have to work on your marketing personas to reach out to your audiences effectively across platforms. Like audiences on Instagram and Pinterest are not of the same type and belong to a different set of aspirations and dispositions. And the same person can carry a different mood and purpose in mind, based on the idea and offering of that platform. Also, different networks have users that priorly belong to different demographics. An average user on TikTokis younger than the one you find on Facebook.
So, it makes sense to build multiple marketing personas to suit different platforms. Here, while doing this you have to assign your customer base different buyer perspectives and user roles and map them with different platform objectives. Like you can target millennial parents through Twitter but to target small enterprises you have a better opportunity with Instagram.
This way you can appoint the right marketing personas to target the right audience picking up content ideas and communication tone to suit the case and get you the most response from audiences.
Action steps:
Examine network demographics and find your marketing connect with them.
Create personas and assign them platforms.
Build content that resonates with these personas.
As you are done with your copies and visuals, the most important element that goes into creating a brand is the voice it owns. It is about the opinion, style, personality, disposition, character, and interactive value it holds as a brand. The major brand personas that drive brand voices can be categorized into Excitement, Sincerity, Competence, Ruggedness, and Sophistication. Choosing from these personas or the one that fits your idea the best you can decide on what tone your brand should adopt to interact with your audiences.
Your voice and tone guides should be describing and establishing your brand’s persona going with your idea and trait of communication. It should have a perspective and stand that consistently goes across to form its identity as a brand. So, your brand recognition and recall value get stronger and more compelling.
Action steps:
Involve all teams across departments to act collaboratively to create your brand voice.
Write out your voice guide to make it more assertive and perceptible.
Audit your tone and its styles to match a given purpose or situation.
Depending on your business’s scope, range, and size of operations you have to diversify and position your social media presence. Like, if you have a diverse range of products or you operate from multiple locations you should be serving a varied set of audiences. This makes it a bit difficult and impractical to reach them all using the same profile. So, having different accounts for the same platform is what you should look out to have here.
Here, you can reach out to users from different geographical locations (who look at your services from different perspectives)through different profiles that cater to more relevant, target-specific, and identifiable communication per location.
Also, if you can have separate accounts for marketing and customer service. So, you can attend them with well-targeted and specific communication.
Similarly, you can have these for different service roles and product lines that attract a sizeable amount of diversified set of audiences.
Action steps:
Check with your offerings and value propositions and break your profile categories accordingly.
Apply your branding step consistently across the profiles.
Maintain all the accounts with focused efforts and detailed tracking.
Closure
Applying these actionable strategies for branding on social media can get you to lead your business to a recognizable entity that is perceived and received in the desired manner. You can have better value created through social networks and make the most of the presence and reach there. While you do this, just make sure you keep your plans all prepared and focused to be executed and tracked right with makeshift strategies addressing parallel possibilities. So, you can deal with the dynamic online audience network and the ever-evolving digital trends most effectively, to get the best response with branding on social media.