How to Build a Strong Social Media Branding Strategy

Last updated on September 21st, 2023 at 03:49 pm

Social media has existed for more than 40 years now. But in the early days, it never gained the status that it enjoys today. It was only after social networking sites significantly impacted people’s lives that it came to the fore. Earlier, TV and email were the only powerful branding mediums. But today, most companies are displaying their brands on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms to gain new customers and retain existing ones.

So these questions make sense:

• What strategies should you apply to attract people’s attention?

• How should you make people loyal to your offerings?

• What should you do differently to stand out from your competitors?

• What should you do so that your customers recognize your brand even if they see it for the first time on social media?

Many other questions may come up in your mind. This guide will provide step-by-step answers to all your problems by giving 5 actionable strategies for social media branding.

Let’s begin by understanding that a logo is an essential yet small part of your brand. Some experts suggest that a logo defines everything about your brand. They will usually quote Apple’s example and ask, “What comes to your mind when you see its logo?” Then they will say the following things:

• iPhones
• High-quality products
• Expensive products
• The biggest company in the world (By turnover)
• Steve Jobs

You will get the same answer even if you ask a person walking on the street.

In reality, there is much more to a brand. Let’s begin.

1. Maintain uniformity across all social media platforms

Many companies think that only by posting their content on social media platforms will they create a famous brand and attract people. There is no direct relationship between the number of articles you publish and the number of visitors you get. Apart from posting fresh and new content, ensure that your branding is uniform across all social media platforms. Many companies have different usernames, logos, and branding styles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Here are some actionable steps you must keep in mind:

• Ensure that your logo has the same color and design across all social media platforms.

• Banner designs must be consistent.

• If your logo has text, ensure that it’s visible and perfectly aligned with your brand guidelines.

• Perform periodic social media branding audits to learn about customer preferences.

2. Focus on visual branding

An essential component of social media branding strategy is focusing on clear and consistent visual branding. Whether your customer visits your Facebook page, Instagram page or LinkedIn page should take them only a fraction of a second to realize that you have posted it.

Here are some actionable steps you must keep in mind:

• The topics in your content calendar are aligned with your company’s vision, mission, and values.

• Participate in online trade shows or conferences to build your brand.

• Partner with other companies and websites that have common goals and aspirations.

• Associate with the right influencers who can help you get access to your target segment.

• Prepare a graphical template that contains instructions regarding font, font size, color, design, aesthetics, and color choices, and then stick to it.

3. Create useful marketing personas

After you have created a consistent branding style and have decided to stick to it, you must develop powerful marketing personas.

Marketing personas are important because your audience is different across all social media platforms. The audience on TikTok is usually younger than those on Twitter. Let’s consider the following example:

Suppose you sell toys for children aged 10-15. You can engage with children by creating funny videos on TikTok and memes on Facebook. On the other hand, you can form a separate group for targeting the children’s parents on Twitter.

Here are some actionable steps you must keep in mind:

• Build different market personas for various social media marketing platforms.

• Create varying content calendars as per the marketing personas you have built.

• Examine your customers’ buying journey based on geography, demography, behavior, and psychographics to understand your customers’ needs, wants, desires, and ambitions.

• Surf through customer queries and hold discussion sessions to address their key pain points.

4. Create multiple accounts to focus on different brands

This point is for conglomerates or big companies that have several brands under their belt. If you belong to this category, you must create multiple accounts that will focus on different brands. With this strategy, you can:

• Hyper-focus on a single brand and expand its bandwidth.

• Publish brand-relevant content that talks about the features and benefits of that particular brand.

• Cater to a particular audience by providing instant replies to customer queries.

Here are the different ways through which you can implement this approach:

• Building a separate marketing and customer service Twitter account for those brands that receive multiple customer queries daily.

• Creating a Facebook account as per geographical location offers solutions to customers living in that particular geography.

• Form a mascot account to provide a comprehensive outlook of all the branding activities that you do. The best example is that of organizations that conduct international sports events like the Olympics.

• Make a department-specific account that provides details regarding the different departments in your business. Educational institutions with various departments like Science, Humanities, Economics, Engineering, and others mainly use this strategy.

Here are some actionable steps you must keep in mind:

• Identify which products and services have a significant market share and create social media accounts focusing mainly on those brands.

• Ensure that your social media branding efforts are consistent for a particular brand. For example, suppose you own two beverage brands — a soft drink for teenagers and a hard drink for older adults. The former’s messaging should be eye-catching and vibrant, while the latter’s should be regal and classy. Most importantly, the marketing strategy for both these brands should be distinct and suit the customer’s needs.

• Use a service that helps you integrate all your branding efforts into a single window. It will help you coordinate effectively and provide a clearer picture of the branding efforts at large.

5. Measure your social media branding efforts

Each business wants to increase its followers across social media accounts, but only a few of them know how to execute social media tactics in real time. As we have seen above, logos, taglines, and brand colors are a tiny part of any branding campaign. Other things like target customer segments, product features, customer recommendations, and word of mouth constitute your brand voice’s main components.

• Here are some actionable steps you must keep in mind:

• Conduct regular market surveys to know how customers are responding to your branding efforts. It will provide you with a sense of direction as to how you should design your marketing efforts.

• Analyze the social media trends to know what people are liking and following. Craft your social media strategies around these points to increase your following.

Conclusion

Social media branding strategies take significant time to brainstorm and implement. Even after implementation, it takes quite some time to get the desired results. So first of all, you require a lot of patience. The second most crucial component of social media branding strategy is consistency. You need to churn high-quality data and monitor customer reactions consistently. By utilizing the tips mentioned in this article, you will improve your brand’s social appeal and gain lots of online followers.