Social Media Branding – An Essential Strategy For Business Growth

In the era of social media, branding is an essential growth strategy for businesses to create sustainability in a very competitive space. For marketers, branding is a priority because it helps to raise awareness. The growth of social media as a prominent digital marketing channel means that companies are placing greater emphasis on creating a social media presence to advertise their products and services.

According to statistics, there are about 3.8 billion social media users as of 2020. 80% of consumers are likely to evaluate solutions from brands they follow on social channels. The huge social media marketplace is brimming with prospects, and it’s an opportunity for companies to turn them into customers. What branding does is make a company instantly recognizable.

Every aspect of a brand must be a true representation of what the business stands for, it must reflect the vision and mission of the company. A good brand strategy allows businesses to be distinguishable from their competitors. Social media branding can help companies to reach the right audience that they would want to channel into their sales funnel and create brand loyalty and advocacy. 

Here are some tips to create an effective social media branding strategy

1. Brand identity
A company’s brand identity must be consistent across all social channels. A social media audit of all accounts will ensure that you are offering your followers a consistent experience on social media. All aesthetic points such as graphics, colour, style, tone, and language must be the same. Familiarity and consistency help to create brand awareness. A common theme across all social platforms that align with your brand image is important to create recognition and unity. Creating a social media calendar will help businesses to constantly update their social posts at the same time across multiple platforms. 

2. Visual branding
As more social media platforms turn their focus on visual content, it is imperative for businesses to do the same. A unique logo, a catchy tagline, and a pleasing color palette are all a part of branding. These elements must be the same across all the platforms. Beyond these elements, there must be consistency in the color scheme and fonts that are used on videos and images, as that further enhances your brand recognition. A consistent visual concept means that your customers can recognize your work even without looking at the logo.

3. Customer personas
For marketers, creating buyer personas helps them to understand the customer’s intent and usage of their products and services. Every platform has a different dominant demographic. For example, Tiktok and Snapchat have a larger Gen Z audience while Facebook has an older demographic. The content across all these platforms must be designed to resonate with its predominant users. Creating customer personas for every social platform will help businesses to effectively map the different customer journeys taken by their customers. Social listening will enable you to understand the consumer base of each network and allow you to customize content to match the personas.

4. Brand voice and tone
A unique voice and tone, over a period of time, become synonymous with a brand’s personality. It is important to narrow down to a certain persona, writing style, and tone that is consistent with the company’s brand image. Assessing your products and target audience can help you determine the voice and tone of your social media branding. The tone of voice must reflect how the brand communicates with its followers online. For example, Burger King is known for its playful and funny tone of voice, famous for roasting its rivals. Depending on your target audience, the language on your social post may vary. For a younger audience, urban slang and simple language may be a better fit, while for a niche brand a professional and industry-specific language would resonate better. 

5. Multiple accounts for different focuses
For companies with a diverse audience and a big range of products and services, it’s a practical move to create multiple accounts for different purposes. Big corporations create location-based social media accounts to provide more personalized content and service to their audience. For those businesses with a high number of inquiries, it is a better option to create different accounts for marketing and customer service. All accounts must align with the brand identity to ensure a seamless customer experience for all their customers.

Final Thoughts

Social media branding is a continuous process that requires time and effort. Monitoring and adjusting branding strategies according to the evolving scenario will ensure that you see positive results from your branding efforts. At Alkye, we help clients to create branding strategies that help them gain instant recognition and competitive advantage over their rivals.