Rules of Branding on Social Media
Written By: ShaneWebGuy on August 21, 2020
Social media marketing would not be complete with a proper branding campaign. You may be familiar with traditional branding. However, social media branding is a different animal altogether. Let’s tackle each of the components, so you have a good start.
Begin the process by selecting the most ideal and appropriate social media networks. Not all systems are perfect. Discover where your customers are and attract them to your social media platforms. If you do this right, maintaining the social media networks of your choice won’t be such a drain on you.
The Plan
A social media branding plan considers five different sectors: customer service, sales, customer loyalty, lead generation, and brand awareness. If you have all of these in your strategy, you will be assured of long term success in your market.
The essential goal of social media branding is for people to convert to actual, paying customers online. Since customers tend to be on their phones and scanning social media, it would be best to still be in the same environment as your customers. Social media platforms connect your business to relevant people who might be interested in your products and services. The sale process, therefore, becomes more productive, and the ROI will significantly increase over time.
If we summarize what will happen over time with social media branding, the process will look like this:
– Brand exposure – The customer sees your brand for the first time.
– Brand engagement – The customer interacts with your business on a social media platform.
– Soft lead generation – The customer signs up for a promotion, free download, or any other campaign that requires personal data input.
– Prospect conversion – The customer buys something from your site or pays for a service.
– Customer retention – The customer becomes loyal to the brand and will buy again because of the trust.
The Areas
Four key areas will cement your social media branding efforts.
Branding Identity
Branding identity tackles how you define your brand. What are the points of differentiation? What does your business wish to expand and achieve? Who do you want to impress and attract to your social media sites?
The clearer and more specific the branding plan, the easier it will be for you to lay down your social media brand.
Your Business’ Audience
How much of your audience do you honestly know? Can you identify the potential segments in your market? Knowing your audience is equivalent to understanding them. Branding is all about creating specific messages that will help you achieve your goals for each campaign. What is often confusing is how you are going to approach your audience. We go back to the premise that you need to know your audience first before you can talk to them online.
A classic approach to knowing an audience is “getting into their shoes.” For example, if your business sells spare computer parts, how do you communicate with people who need the parts? Why should they choose your site instead of others? Also, did you know that 89% of social media users are 18-29 years old? This number is a massive chunk of the amount, so you may want to keep this mind when creating campaigns.
Your Content for Social Media
Social media platforms mean nothing with content and engagement. It’s essential to create and share the right type of content. Find out what your competition is doing to reduce the learning curve. Just knowing what kind of content works best for specific campaigns is a boon to any business that wants to expand its branding to social media platforms. The second source of useful data is analytics. When you start posting stuff on social media, you can begin finding ways to improve your content by checking how successful it becomes through analytics. What type of content will produce the most reach and engagement? What kind of content triggers the highest level of commitment?
Social media traffic continues to increase by the year. Is your business ready to engage your users effectively on social media?
The Visual Design
Social media platforms often have fixed designs, so the design is going to work with the content that you post and the editable areas such as the default picture and the banner or cover image. The mind processes visual design 60,000 times faster than text, so it makes a lot of sense to make the best impression on people with the best visual design you can think of.
Work with a designer and don’t DIY your social media sites. Get it right at the beginning, and you are going to enjoy your run with social media even more.
Branding Myths
You’re Going to Become Popular Right Away
While some things go viral on the Internet, there is no guarantee that you will continue being viral for a long time. Viral content has such a nature – it spreads like wildfire, and then is forgotten. The quality of viral content is going to be problematic for a business that needs a steady stream of commerce rather than a big bonfire.
You Need to Be Online Everywhere
Not every social network is useful for all businesses. Food businesses often use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A food business would look awkward on LinkedIn. If you are a headhunter, LinkedIn is the best place to come into contact with prospective employees. It is going to be challenging to hunt down talent on Twitter and Facebook.
You Can Leave Your Social Media Be After Setting It Up
The idea that chatbots don’t need monitoring and managing is the most dangerous myth because there’s no way you are going to succeed if you don’t mind your networks regularly. Like we said earlier, social media only works when there is content, and then engagement. By engagement, we mean that you need to speak to your would-be customers and returning customers online. Without contact and proper content, your social media sites are going to flounder.
Summary:
Social media marketing will be ineffective without proper branding. If you need help designing your strategy, call me today, and let’s talk about how your social media marketing can improve dramatically.
