4 Tips for Building Your Brand on Social Media

Social media is a reliable marketing tool for many reasons. A major one is simply the fact that an active social media presence allows you the opportunity to build your brand. With a strong brand identity, you’ll find it’s much easier to not only attract customers but also maintain their loyalty.

That said, you may not know how to go about cultivating a brand on social media. But don’t worry. We can help! The following tips will help you better understand how to leverage your social media presence in this capacity.

Building Your Brand on Social Media: What You Need to Know

1. Know Your Audience to Know Your Channels

All marketers understand the importance of knowing their audience. You can only create marketing content that resonates with your target audience if you define who they are first.

This same principle applies to social media branding. Specifically, to which channels are worth your focus. After all, you don’t want to waste time managing a social media presence on a channel your target audience rarely uses.

For instance, if you’re marketing for a B2B business, it would likely make sense to use LinkedIn, which is ideal for reaching other business owners. On the other hand, if you were marketing for an app aimed at younger consumers, you would benefit more from developing your brand on Instagram and Snapchat. Define your audience and research where they spend most of their time on social media.

2. Consider Working with Influencers

Your brand is important because it (when developed properly) can result in your audience associating your products or services with certain values, attitudes, and experiences. Your brand is essentially an identity for your business. It’s almost like a friend your audience wants to spend time with.

For example, strong branding has always played a crucial role in Apple’s success. By marketing itself as a company that values innovation, rebelliousness, and creativity, Apple cultivated an image for itself that has yielded major customer loyalty over the years.

Thus, you could leverage your social media strategy for improved branding by coordinating with influencers. You specifically want to find social media influencers whose brands correspond with your goals. They’ll promote your business to their followers, helping you cast a wider net while associating your business with their branded identity.

For example, maybe your business sells outdoor sports apparel. Your ideal brand might thus evoke a sense of adventurousness. Building your brand on social media would be much easier if you coordinated with an Instagram influencer who is known for sharing pictures of outdoor adventures they’ve taken throughout the world.

3. Maintain Visual Consistency

Again, your brand reflects your business’ “personality.” That’s why it needs to be consistent. If you met someone in the real world who behaved in vastly different ways from one day to the next, you’d have a hard time describing that individual to someone else.

A simple way to maintain consistency is to focus on consistent visual content. Across all social media channels, use the same (or very similar) logo. When developing visual content, try to stick to a consistent color palette.

Doing so won’t merely help you maintain a consistent brand. It will also help you attract more attention from potential customers on social media.

Social media users are bombarded with content on a daily basis, making it difficult for a brand to make a lasting impression the first time a user is exposed to it. However, if you maintain visual consistency, eventually, users will start noticing your content more often and associating it with your brand.

It’s like a uniform. If you see someone wearing a uniform once, you might not think much of it. If they wear the same uniform every day, however, you’ll start noticing it and start thinking about that person whenever you see it (both when they’re wearing it and when you see the same uniform elsewhere).

4. Generate Content

Your social media strategy should, of course, involve sharing content that will resonate with your followers. To some extent, you can share content regularly by sharing the content of others. If you read an article or see a video you believe your audience would respond to, it makes sense to share it.

Doing so can help with building your brand on social media to a degree. However, if you rely solely on others’ content, you can’t exercise full control over your own branded identity. You may want your followers to associate your brand with a similar brand to generate initial interest. However, in the long run, your goal is to establish your own unique identity.

You can do so by regularly generating content and sharing it, which can include:

• blog posts
• images
• videos
• podcast episodes, and more

What’s most important is that the content you generate should be consistently designed to express the values of your brand (and resonate with your followers).

That doesn’t mean you always need to share content that explicitly tells your audience what your brand’s key traits are. On the contrary, it’s far more important to generate content that naturally embodies your brand’s values and identity. Plus, good social media content leads to improvements in Search Engine Optimization efforts as well, making internet users more likely to find your site.

For example, perhaps you’re marketing for a kitchenware brand. A key element of your branded identity might be a sense of playfulness and helpfulness. You don’t take yourself too seriously, but you do want to help your customers in the kitchen. In this case, you might regularly post videos in which funny and casual hosts (perhaps belonging to the same demographic as your target audience) provide cooking tips. You could also demonstrate how to use your products in these videos, showing their value while also achieving your branding goals.

If building your brand on social media seems like a challenge, you’ll find it’s much easier when you apply these tips. Just remember, as with any component of your social media strategy, you need to refine your approach as you experiment with different tactics. Learning what works and making changes when necessary is essential to your branding success. These tips will simply help you get started.