Expert Tips For 5 Actionable Strategies For Social Media Branding

To succeed in business in 2021, you want to get some critical business strategies right for marketing. Two of these are your branding and your social media strategy.  A branding strategy is not just a logo or a color scheme. Successful branding runs much deeper than that. Your branding is essential because it is your identity and your essence. It is what builds a relationship with you and your potential customers.  Good branding signifies recognition and trust. All successful businesses need strong, consistent, and relatable branding.

Social media is how your brand can reach customers. The channels in which they can identify with your brand and where you can harvest those relationships from simple awareness and recognition to loyal and repeat custom. The power of social media marketing for businesses is not to be underestimated, and if you can get your social media branding right, it will pay dividends to your business. So here are 5 actionable strategies for social media branding.

Develop a user persona

Social media is all about people, and the better you understand people, the better you can design your content and campaigns. A user persona is a fictional representation of a social media user. Developing personas is a common marketing strategy and is fast becoming a popular social media strategy. The actionable step you can take is to develop two to five user personas.

These are social media users to whom you are aiming your content at, your potential customers. Develop them in great detail. Go beyond age and gender and utilize metrics such as what social media channels they are likely to use, at what times, what their income is, where they live, their hobbies, the types of media they respond to, audio, video, or text for example. The more detailed you can be, the better.

Why?

Doing this will help you create content that will appeal to them and allow you to publish it when they are most likely to see it. It will also enable you to develop your branding to align with your identified personas and appeal to them directly.

Develop a tone of voice

Your brand’s tone of voice on social media is fundamental. You will want to develop a tone of voice that is consistent and in keeping with your business. You will want to communicate in a way that resonates with your audience. For example, if you are an educational business that needs respect, you will want your social media content to be professional, grammatically correct, formal, and authoritative.

If you are a fashion retailer aimed at younger audiences, you may want to include emojis in your content and use a playful, fun tone of voice. The actionable steps you can take are to use the personas you have already created, identify the tone of voice that would best target your audience, and think about ways to convey your brand’s tone of voice in the content you create.

For example, will light-hearted GIFs with colloquialism speak best to your personas, or will more formal, knowledgeable text pieces be more appropriate?

Why?

A consistent and well-designed tone of voice will help build trust and understanding with your audience and build authenticity. It will also help to reach the audience you most want to reach by communicating in a way that appeals to them.

Create a sociable brand

If you are going to use social media for your business, you must remember that it is exactly that, social. Social media was created and originally used as a means of socializing. For seeing what friends and family have been up to in a shared space. As time has gone on, brands have got savvy to social media and found a place for themselves and their advertising.

That said, if you want to use social media to advance your business, first and foremost, you have to treat it as a social space. It is a place to engage with potential customers, talk with them, like photos, share posts, and interact. It is not a space to plug advert after advert.

To create a sociable brand, the actionable strategy is using social media to engage with its users, not advertise. Socialize with people you have identified in your user personas using the consistent and relevant tone of voice you identified in step two. Don’t just talk about yourself.

You have to talk about the interests of those you want to attract to draw them in and engage with you. Only when you have started to build a relationship can you start to use this space for advertising. If you feel out of your depth in terms of content creation and creating a sociable brand, consider using some of the best social media services available to either advise you or take over this aspect of your social media branding on your behalf.

Why?

Brands that use social media for advertising only will turn off potential customers. Their content will not add any value to the lives of their customers and will be viewed as unengaging spam that is not worth their time.

Uniform approach

While branding is more than just a logo or an aesthetical identifier having a uniform approach to your visual branding across your social media channels. As always, consistency is paramount, and sticking with the same color palette, fonts, and tone of voice is always advised. You may, of course, want to deviate slightly depending upon the platform to fit the user but don’t stray too far from your brand’s visual essence.

Some actionable strategies are to employ the services of a design agency partner to help design the aesthetics of your social media branding consistently and appealingly to your user personas.

Why?

Consistency will help increase brand awareness and recognition and, in turn, build trust and confidence in your brand.

Metrics

Measuring the effects of your efforts on social media can be difficult, particularly given its subjective nature, but there are means to measure your success. Social media channels offer various insight tools, and you can use these to measure your engagements.

When it comes to social media success, engagement is king, and content is queen. You can use these insights to experiment with the tone of voice, types of content you share, and when you share it to see what is best received by your audience. As a general rule, the more engagement you have, the better received your approach has been.

Actionable strategies include experimenting with the times and days you post your content and the type of content. You can then study the data insights to identify the most successful posts. This will give you a better idea of the types of posts and content that your audience enjoys.

Why?

No one wants to waste time lovingly creating content that isn’t seen or enjoyed by those aimed at.