Customers are more likely to judge your company based on your social media than they are on your website. Over three-quarters of consumers (and 88 percent of Gen Z) say social media presence has a bigger impact on whether they trust brands or not.
In some cases, social media will be the first touchpoint customers have with your brand. So, how do you make that first (or second, third, or thirtieth) impression count?
Exceptional social media branding is key.
A strong and authentic brand can help your company stand apart from competitors, increase your reach, and encourage customers to make a purchase.
In this article, I’ll explain all that contributes to your social media brand, why you should start improving it today, and five best practices to get you started.
Key Takeaways
- Your social media brand encapsulates your company’s image, identity, and messaging across all social platforms. It doesn’t have to be the exact brand you portray on your website, but it should be consistent across all social channels.
- Social media branding helps companies solidify their brand perception, reach a wider audience, and increase engagement levels.
- Creating a consistent visual identity and tone of voice is an essential part of any social media branding strategy.
- You need to post regularly on a variety of platforms. Use a social media content calendar to enforce a schedule and ensure every post meets business objectives.
- Understand who you are speaking to with well-defined customer profiles. The better you understand your audience, the easier it will be to create content that aligns with their interests.
- Partnering with influencers can help you piggyback off established audiences. Work with micro-influencers to get the best value for money.
- Use native and third-party social media monitoring tools to track your success.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What is Social Media Branding And Why Is It Important?
- Benefits of Effective Social Media Branding
- Best Practices for Social Media Branding
- How My Agency Built Its Social Media Branding
- FAQs
- Conclusion
What is Social Media Branding And Why Is It Important?
Social media branding is the art and science of sculpting your business identity on social channels like X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Your social media brand is your company persona—your look, tone, and message. It should distinguish you from competitors and give your target audience a reason to follow you.
You can establish your social media brand by posting engaging content and building meaningful connections with your target audience. Once you’ve got it locked down, your followers will be able to identify your content even if your name isn’t next to it.
Think about brands like Wendy’s, Red Bull, and Nike.
These brands are super-successful on social media. They have incredibly strong brand personas to the point where I bet you could instantly pick out one of their post.
Social media branding isn’t the be-all and end-all, however. It’s an extension of your company’s wider digital marketing strategy and one part of a social media marketing strategy. A strong social media brand can support other marketing efforts like SEO or paid ad campaigns by increasing touchpoints and nudging customers further down the funnel with every informative or funny post.
On the other hand, weak social media branding can cause confusion and apathy. If you don’t convey a consistent image, come across as self-promotional, or fail to provide value, potential customers won’t follow you. It’s as simple as that.
Benefits of Effective Social Media Branding
Whether you’re a startup or a well-established company, there are plenty of reasons to invest in social media brand marketing.
- Build or improve your reputation: A strong social media brand helps users understand what your company stands for—even if they’ve never heard of it before. Effective branding is also a powerful way to change user perceptions. Side note: I’ll show you exactly how my agency leveraged this benefit at the end of this article.
- Reach a wider audience: Posting consistently engaging and informative content will help users discover your brand. If your branding is really strong, you’ll also stick in the minds of your target audience in the same way the three brands I mentioned above do.
- Increase engagement: A strong brand also increases engagement with your existing audience. When you post something meaningful, users are much more likely to interact with your brand, share your content, and click through to your site.
Best Practices for Social Media Branding
Looking for advice on how to build a brand on social media? Dive into my five best practices below.
Have A Consistent Presence
Your brand should look and feel the same across every social media platform.
The more you reinforce your brand image, the more easily followers will recognize your content in the future. A consistent brand also builds trust, makes it easy for audience members to follow you across different platforms, and gives them the confidence to buy from you.
It starts with visuals.
Use your website’s color palettes, logos, and images to ensure the visual branding of all your social profiles is very similar, if not the same. Make sure to use the same colors and images in your posts, too.
For example, my agency maintains a consistent image on LinkedIn even though we can only show our logo and a thin banner image. We manage to work in our brand colors, strapline, and some of our most prominent awards.
You don’t just want your profiles to look the same, though. You want them to sound the same, too.
A well-defined social media brand will have a recognizable voice and use the same tone and style in every post.
If you already have brand and style guidelines for your website, you can use them for social media, too. But don’t worry if your social voice differs slightly from the voice you use on your corporate website. It’s okay — even encouraged — to be more informal and friendly on social media.
If you’re creating a social media branding guide from scratch, then include the following elements to make it easy for anyone to pick it up and start posting:
- Your logo and color palette
- Other common images
- Relevant hashtags
- Your tone, with examples
- Other posting habits, like the use of emojis
Here’s a great example from Discord:
While a consistent presence is key, be careful of spreading yourself too thin. I recommend prioritizing the platforms most important for your business. B2B brands, for example, should probably prioritize LinkedIn. A B2C brand with a Gen Z focus, on the other hand, should prioritize TikTok.
Provide Relevant Content On Socials
Excessive self-promotion is not appropriate in a social media branding strategy. Instead, your posts should offer value to followers.
That could be advice, entertainment, or something else entirely. Whatever you post, the key is to be original and relevant. Try to say things others aren’t saying. Going against perceived common wisdom can be particularly powerful, for example.
High-quality, engaging, and informative content will position your brand as an industry authority. Users are more likely to engage with great content too, which means more shares, clicks, and followers.
One-off posts aren’t enough to build a brand on social media—even if you go viral. You need to be posting consistently. Not so much that you flood your followers’ feeds, mind you, but enough to stay relevant.
If you’re wondering exactly how often you should be posting on each channel, the social media team at Hootsuite did the research and came up with the following:
When it comes to creating a consistent posting schedule, a social media content calendar can be a savior. Spending time to establish what you’ll post and when will make posting relevant content way less stressful. It will also help you see the bigger picture and make sure all of your posts are contributing towards a marketing or business objective.
Build Out Customer Profiles
To build meaningful connections with your audience, you need to know who they are and what they care about.
The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to create content that jives with their interests and helps them achieve their goals.
I recommend building out detailed customer profiles for each channel that include details like:
- Demographics (like age, gender, and location)
- Goals
- Pain points
- Job role and industry
- Other accounts they follow
Here’s an example of what a finished customer profile should look like courtesy of Adobe:
Engaging with your community can help, too. The more you speak to followers in your comments and look up their profiles, the easier it will be to form a strong perception of the kind of people you should be talking to.
Partner With Relevant Influencers
There’s nothing wrong with leveraging other people’s great branding to grow your social media presence. That’s what influencer marketing is all about!
Social media influencers hold sway over large followings—people who could eventually follow your business. Influencers are seen as more authentic than brands, so partnering with them can help some of that authenticity and credibility rub off on you.
Don’t just work with anyone, however. You only want to spend time and effort with influencers who align with your company values and can deliver results.
I recommend making sure influencers:
- Fit your niche: There’s no point courting a famous pop culture influencer if you sell B2B project management software. Productivity gurus are a much better choice.
- Meet your budget: If you can afford an influencer with a million followers, brilliant. Most brands, however, are better off seeking micro-influencers. These are people with highly-engaged audiences of between 1,000 and 50,000 people.
- Have a history of promoting similar brands: You don’t want to be a guinea pig, especially if it’s your first time working with an influencer.
Take author and entrepreneur Janell Roberts, for example.
Her relatively small (11.6K followers on Instagram) but highly engaged audience makes her the perfect partner for a company like House of CB, which sells luxury womenswear.
Have A Measurement Plan
You know the saying by now: what gets measured gets managed!
That’s why my final best practice is to establish a measurement plan so you can track your success and tweak your strategy.
Signing up for business accounts with each platform can help in this regard. They tend to have platform-specific analytics that you can’t always get elsewhere. Here’s TikTok’s business center dashboard, for example:
I recommend paying for a third-party analytics tool, too. I have reviewed some of the best social media analytics tools here, but Hootsuite and Buffer are good options for centralizing social media analytics, automating the posting process, and uncovering insights you can use to grow.
Use these platforms to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your goals and measure your success.
For example, tracking follower count will be vital if I want to grow my audience. If building relationships is more important, however, I’ll want to prioritize engagement metrics like comments and likes.
These platforms aren’t just a great way to track your overall success, you can also use insights to improve your strategy. You may find one type of post does far better than others. Or that posting at a certain time drives the most engagement. Either way, you can use this information to tweak your content calendar and drive better results.
How My Agency Built Its Social Media Branding
I’m a big proponent of practicing what you preach. So, it’s only fair I show you how my agency improved its social media branding strategy.
You see, we weren’t convinced our public image aligned with our business objectives. Specifically, we wanted to be seen as a global integrated performance marketing agency—the kind that serviced a diversified portfolio of enterprise clients.
We already have excellent SEO and PPC strategies in place, but they aren’t always suitable for quickly changing public perceptions. So, we turned to social media branding to build relationships with new and existing clients, boost social engagement in general, and increase intent from qualified candidates on our channels.
First, we revamped branding across every platform and consolidated accounts where appropriate. We moved all of our separate Instagram accounts to one global one, for example:
Then, we created social calendars specific to each channel. The focus was on creating quality content and graphics that aligned with each platform’s intent, met the business objectives outlined above, and provided massive value to our audiences.
Here’s an example from our LinkedIn profile that incorporates our brand image, addresses our target market (B2B marketers) and displays our expertise with a quote from our Content Production Lead, Shelby Dias:
As you can see, that’s very different from the content we post on TikTok. Here, we prioritize short videos featuring myself or members of my team:
At the end of the day, the results were pretty impressive if I do say so myself:
- Our content received over 1.4 million impressions. That’s a 66 percent increase on what we were doing before.
- Our contentreceived over 135,000 engagements, an average engagement rate of 9.6 percent, and a 63 percent year-over-year increase.
- You better believe those views and engagements turned into clicks, totaling over 103,000 clicks.
- Our follower count increased by over 12,700. LinkedIn had the most growth, with an increase of over 9k followers, which was perfect considering our target audience was marketers at enterprise companies.
FAQs
What is social media branding?
Social media branding is a marketing strategy where businesses distribute content across social media platforms to improve brand recognition and build meaningful connections with their target audience.
Why is social media branding important?
Social media branding is important because it helps build and reinforce your online reputation. Consistent posting helps customers form a perception of your brand and keeps you in front of mind.
How can I implement social media branding strategies?
Consistency is key when it comes to implementing any social media branding strategy. Whether you’re creating informative posts on LinkedIn that help your target audience achieve their goals or entertaining followers on Instagram with dog videos, you want to be posting regularly.
Maintaining a consistent brand image is also important. Every post should mirror your style guidelines and be written in the same tone.
What are the key elements of a successful social media branding plan?
A strong visual identity, a consistent tone of voice, and incredibly engaging content are the cornerstones of a successful social media branding plan.
Rather than promote your brand, you should be doing everything possible to deliver value to your followers. It doesn’t matter if you’re offering advice or providing entertainment, don’t half-ass it!
How can I monitor and improve my social media branding results?
There are two sets of tools you can use to monitor and improve your social media branding efforts. The first is the native monitoring tools every social channel has. These provide accurate insights on things like engagement and follower growth.
The second is third-party analytics tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. These platforms centralize all your social media branding data, allowing you to monitor everything in one place and compare the growth of one platform against another.
Conclusion
Now it’s over to you. Social media branding is a great way to achieve key objectives, improve your reach, and connect with your target audience.
While you may be eager to achieve those business goals, don’t be afraid of letting your personality show. Social media isn’t the same as your blog. A friendly, approachable social media brand will resonate way more with users than a stuffy corporate one.
So get your brand identity in order, draw up guidelines that spell out your tone of voice, and create a content calendar that ensures you consistently post on-brand, relevant messages across several social accounts.
But there isn’t a single best branding style. Track your results, and don’t be afraid to mix up your strategy.
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