The Global Web Index’s Online Commerce Report states that 42% of internet users use social media to research product prices and quality. That necessitates businesses of all sizes to have a solid online presence. Social media is essential for this.
Easy accessibility to various social networks facilitates vast reach and a mammoth potential to grow—not only for brands and businesses but also for individual creators. Social media branding is one of the first steps to master when launching your business online.
The Million Insights report predicts that the global social media advertising market will reach a staggering USD 261.62 billion by 2028. How you display the brand online is paramount to successfully navigating a highly competitive landscape. It presents an opportunity to showcase your brand, advertise your products/services, establish customer relationships, and build a larger community.
What is social media branding, and what does it comprise? This article explains all aspects and effective strategies for maximizing a brand’s online presence.
What is Social Media Branding
Social media branding is the process of carving an identity on social media platforms that remains particular to a brand, business, or individual. It encompasses a brand’s vision, mission, conversational tone, and messaging to distinguish itself from others. A part of the branding process is creating a distinctive persona that your audience can relate to and identify with in the future.
Social branding includes:
- Brand Identity: This refers to the logo, tagline, colors, and fonts used in creatives.
- Tone: How do you communicate with your audience? Will you keep a conversational tone or a formal, to-the-point approach? This must align with your brand values and the nature of your services.
- Content: The type of social media posts you share frequently, become associated with your brand. Develop a social media strategy to define how you want to be perceived by your target audiences.
Once you finalize these aspects, maintain consistency across all social media channels to build a stronger brand identity.
Benefits of Social Branding
Social media branding lays the foundation of your social media marketing strategy. Your brand voice, content communication, and audience engagement create a lasting impression and fuel your brand awareness.
Here are a few reasons why social media branding matters:
Develop Brand Recognition:
Consistently displaying their logos, colors, and styles can significantly enhance brand recognition and recall. By maintaining a uniform aesthetic and voice across all posts, businesses can form a memorable brand image for their target audience.
Improve Visibility:
Social media platforms allow your brand to be seen by millions of users, even if they are not necessarily following you. By regularly posting engaging content, you can gradually reach a vast audience. Study shows consistent brands will likely experience 3-4 times more visibility than those without.
Shape Brand Perception:
A strong brand perception can convert into more sales. How you engage with your audience and vice-versa reflects your brand personality to others.
A business known for its high-quality products and after-sales services will naturally attract more customers than one with average quality or no support.
Regular engagement and healthy feedback mechanisms help to shape a positive brand perception among new and existing followers.
Generate Leads:
Social media branding provides a broad glimpse into your brand values, vision, and messaging. When people establish you as authentic and trustworthy, they will likely become your future customers.
Steps to Build Your Brand Presence on Social Media
Social media branding requires a clear strategy and a structured plan.
This includes the following steps:
1. Identify Target Audience
Consider the demographics (age group, gender, location) of the target audience. Who do you primarily want to reach with your social media presence? Knowing the exact demographics also helps decide the platforms to emphasize.
To develop a content strategy, consider their interests, pain points, and interactions.
2. Set Brand Guidelines
Standardize a set of regulations defining your brand identity visually and conversationally. This is necessary before you begin content creation to maintain consistency and develop the brand's aesthetic.
Brand guidelines include:
- Brand logo
- Fonts and colors
- Tone, voice, and language usage
- Design elements (photos, videos, animations, and other illustrations)
- Copywriting style
While you can experiment with writing tones and content formats across networks, these social branding guidelines give a headstart to maintain your communication.
3. Decide a Brand Tone
Will you be friendly, funny, or formal? A well-defined brand voice is a major part of brand personality that can influence customer interactions.
Depending on the product and target demographic, you need to find the right tone for your brand. While maintaining a consistent brand tone is recommended, be open to experimentation if something does not work.
4. Choose Social Media Channels
Every social media platform operates differently, but having a presence on every network is unnecessary. Choose a platform where your target audience is more active.
It's also essential to ensure that the content format of a platform aligns with your brand values. For instance, if your target audience is active on TikTok, consider whether your product can be effectively marketed through regular video content.
5. Plan a Content Strategy
Successful and consistent social branding is possible once you craft a content strategy. Make a clear plan with your target audience in mind and align it with your brand objectives.
Decide on the key messaging that reflects your values and goals. Then, plan the types of content—such as photo posts, videos, blogs, or infographics—that will best engage your audience on different platforms. After posting for a few days, use analytics to track performance and adapt your strategy.
It's now possible to integrate your entire content planning, scheduling, and analytics on one dashboard. Consider Highperformr, a comprehensive social CRM for managing your social media presence on LinkedIn and X and creating content for other major social networks.
6. Monitor and Refine
Social media analytics directly indicate whether your branding and content strategy work well for your audience. Regularly analyze performance metrics such as engagement rates, reach, impressions, follower growth, etc., to determine what kind of content resonates with your audience.
Based on these insights, adjust your content types and posting schedules. With constantly changing algorithms, you should refine your content strategy for multiple accounts.
How to Build a Brand on Social Media
Here are a few things you can do to build an online presence and establish a memorable brand identity.
1. Create Engaging Content
Creating on social media demands creativity or piquing the audience’s interest. What you post should elicit a reaction from your followers.
Stay abreast of the latest trends to create content around them. It could be informative or entertaining, but it creates a striking impression that you know what’s happening around you.
If you consistently follow social media trends with your creative spin, the audience will stay tuned for your social posts and engage with them.
2. Be a Storyteller
Despite running a business, show your audience the human side once in a while. You can share personal stories, learnings, successes, and failures from your journey, which can resonate with the public. Craft narratives that people can connect with, to foster a genuine connection with them.
3. Be Consistent
Consistency on social media begins with optimizing all your profiles, maintaining a uniform brand language, and posting relevant content.
If you have a presence on multiple platforms, ensure all the profile pictures, bios, header images, and taglines are the same. This helps make your brand easily recognizable and reliable for your followers.
Ensure you create a content calendar to show up on every platform. Just having an account does not equate to having a social media presence, you need to keep posting and actively engage with the community you’re trying to reach.
4. Maintain Active Engagement
Social media bridges the gap between brand and consumer. Regular interaction shows attentiveness and encourages a loyal community around your brand.
A survey found 76% of people expect companies to reply to social media comments. You can build your reputation as genuinely caring by promptly replying to comments, messages, and brand mentions.
5. Optimize Content for Different Platforms
Tailor your content to fit each social media platform's unique format and audience. What works on Instagram may not be as impactful on LinkedIn. You must adapt your message to suit the platform's context and user expectations.
Creating persistent yet varying content can prove tedious for marketers. But if you use software like Highperformr, you can craft multiple posts at once and tweak them to suit different platforms. It has several free tools that curate content for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, along with blog articles or marketing materials.
Backed by Social AI, it can automate the research process for developing new post ideas. Give a few references, and it will draft ready-to-publish posts on a single click.
6. Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
UGC acts as a powerful form of social media content. The 2023 Digital Trends Report by Deloitte reveals that 50% of consumers discover new products and services from UGC.
It brings a freshness to content consumption and is free to watch, which makes it more enticing. When several users share their positive experiences about your products and services, it can uplift the entire brand’s identity and lead to more sales.
Encourage your loyal customers to share their experiences and promote your content to build a collaborative community.
Measuring The Impact of Your Social Media Branding Strategy
You post consistently and have good content that gets some engagement, but is it enough? Are you able to stand out from the crowd of your competition?
According to research, measuring the impact of social media content is the top challenge marketers face. You must tabulate a few key metrics to know whether your branding efforts are effective. These include:
- Likes/Reactions: The most basic form of engagement indicates how the users connect with your posts.
- Comments: This is a more engaging interaction as users share their thoughts, feedback, or questions about what you have to say.
- Shares/Retweets: When users share or retweet your posts, they find them worthy enough to be seen by their followers. This increases your reach among a wider network.
- Follower Growth Rate: This is another direct indicator of your growth. It denotes your content strategy, and branding efforts yield results as more people wish to follow you or stay tuned to your posts.
There are many more social media metrics to measure the success of your overall marketing. Social media analytics give you valuable insights about your demographics, most active timeframes, and engagement.
Examples of Social Branding Done Right
Still trying to figure out how to execute social branding properly? Look at these brands, which have consistently led their brand positioning and marketing efforts on social media.
1. Redbull
As an energy drink brand, Red Bull has strongly positioned itself in the market. Its slogan, “Red Bull Gives You Wings,” is displayed across all its social channels and emulated in its content creation.
They have tapped into pushing the adrenaline with major stunts in their ad campaigns. From extreme sports to music festivals, they advertise themselves at places that see a burst of thrill and energy. Across LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter, they showcase videos of adrenaline-fueled experiences reinforcing their brand identity. The brand tone appeals to a younger demographic interested in such sports, even as a mere viewer.
2. National Geographic
An iconic brand enriching everyone’s knowledge about the world we live in, National Geographic has mastered community creation through its social media channels. It makes the most of visual content with stunning imagery from its photographers.
Utilizing the power of user-generated content, most photos have a story from the photographer, which adds another personal touch to the post. While on LinkedIn, the approach is to dispense knowledge via articles and newsletters.
The brand has separate Instagram accounts (Natgeo Travel, Natgeo Adventure, Natgeo YourShot) catering to different users’ interests. The core mission to inform, educate, and fuel the audience's curiosity remains common across all accounts. Over the years, it has built a very engaging community.
3. Starbucks
Starbucks is a successful example of how branding and design matter for your well-defined brand identity. The logo of the twin-tailed siren on their tall coffee cups has made a lasting visual impression. Merchandising the logo on tumblers, mugs, and other drinkware is another way to seek loyalty from its patrons. The company aced personalization by mentioning people’s names on their coffee cups.
All its social media channels, including the mobile app, have a simple and clear design. This consistency makes it easily recognizable from its many competitors.
On Facebook and Instagram, the feed colors match the season's drinks or new launches to create virtual and visual excitement.
How Highperformr Can Help in With Branding Efforts
If you use Highperformr for your social media management you have an additional advantage. Beyond simply managing your social media accounts, Highperformr empowers you and your team to craft content, seamless scheduling, automate engagement, and dive deep into analytics—all in one streamlined dashboard. Here’s why you must try it:
- Unified Platform: Consolidate your efforts into a single platform that manages everything from content creation and publication to engagement automation. It has collaboration options, which means your team can work together efficiently, ensuring every post resonates with your brand's voice across different social platforms.
- Employee Advocacy: Highperformr is built for teams and can enable businesses to collectively amplify their brand voice and establish a positive brand image through employee advocacy. With Highperformr, brands can bring together their entire team on one screen, repurpose content from multiple handles, tweak content based on persona, and publish at scale to collectively boost brand voice.
- Advanced Analytics: Its sophisticated analytics tool offers detailed growth funnel analytics. By examining the impact at each point of engagement, you're equipped with sharp insights into what truly works for your audience. It can distinguish between genuine engagement and bots so you can focus on meaningful connections.
Discover which posts spark the most interest, identify your most engaged followers, and stay ahead of trending topics. These follower and engagement trends act as your guide to refine your social media strategies. - Elevated Branding Efforts: At its core, Highperformr elevates your social media presence, transforming followers into loyal customers. By keeping a close eye on the performance of your content and campaigns, you're always in the loop on what drives success for your brand.
Unlock the full potential of your social media presence today.
