In order to survive in a competitive market, you need to be aware of new trends in your industry. According to research, 72% of companies use social media branding to get more people into their sales funnel by giving them a reason to be trusted. Brand consistency across all marketing touchpoints is a challenge for every company, let alone each social network. 

Social Media Branding Tips: Fast Facts

• 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.
• 73% of marketers believe social media has been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.
• 90.4% of Millennials use social media.
• 77.5% of Generation X use social media.
• 48.2% of Baby Boomers use social media.
• 90% of all marketers say social media marketing has increased their business exposure.

In this article, we will be reviewing the tips on social media branding.

What is Social Media Branding?

Social media branding is a strategy used to engage with your target audience on any social media platform. The main purpose of social branding is to achieve brand awareness. Social media marketing requires both strategy and creativity. Without that, most people won't know what your company does. Understanding these core values will help you turn your prospects into customers — no matter if you are a startup company or a well - established brand. Without wasting further time or more time. Let's dive into those tips

1. When Uncertain Use Visuals And Infographic

On a common day to day basis photos, videos and reels are trending right now on social media. As more people, teams, and enterprises increasingly rely on social media branding awareness and engagement increase, the trend towards using multimedia to achieve these objectives is clearly on the rise. A recent social intelligence report by Adobe for 2014 Q1, showed increased engagement with videos posts of up to 25% year - over - year. The highest engagement rate was found among posts with images which accounts for 98% of all engagement on Facebook. What Types of Visuals To Focus On while Social Media Branding?

Visualizations (Like charts and graphs)

Visualizations like charts and graphs are excellent learning tools to explain complex relationships, reveal hidden patterns and trends, and associate seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas. Common examples of data visualizations are line charts, area charts, pie charts, bar charts, histograms, heatmaps, and graphs.

Memes And GIFs

Brands can use memes created by other people for their marketing campaigns, but it is advisable to create your own memes if you plan to use them for marketing purposes. Marketers have to work a little harder to jump onto cultural trends. The hard part is thinking up a witty caption. This example from BarkBox is a handy reference.

Infographics

If you are a regular on the Internet, then you know infographics are everywhere. From explaining complex analytical reports to listing processes and from representing statistics to telling a story, infographics come in handy and are effective in communicating many different scenarios. Infographics are not only cool but they also provide a visually attractive way to present complex information and keep learners hooked. Here is a 5-step guide to help you create compelling and effective infographics for your business strategy.

Screen Shots

These are the best visual tools to explain products and some services better. For example eLearning courses that teach how to navigate a new program or how to use an application use screencasts extensively. It makes perfect sense because the learners get to see and work in a simulated version of the real environment that they would perform in when they go back to their desks. Screenshots are also ideal for courses that teach how to fill out forms and submit them on an online platform. You can then enhance these visuals and make them more effective by adding text blocks and arrows to explain terms and jargon and point out relationships between the various elements on the screen.

Photographs

Using photos shouldn't be what you'd use later. Photos are relevant and memorable tools used to drive learner engagement, attention, reduces cognitive load, and fulfills the learning objectives most efficiently. The images you use in your blog posts tell a story as much as the words do. It’s crucial not only to include images but also to include the right images to help you craft and tell that story. If you follow the best practices listed in this blog post, you’ll be completely fine.

2. Use Your Brand Logo And Name

A logo can and should be more than a symbol of identification. If designed well, it also tells a company's story, by conveying your brand message in a way that helps to establish an emotional connection with your target audience. By keeping your logo clear and visible, your users can easily distinguish between your company's post and the post of other marketers. Keep in mind that it also counts as a brand promotion strategy as you can increase your brand recognition through this.

Benefits Of Using Logo and Name:

• It helps in promoting company products and services.
• It distinguishes you from your competitors.
• Ensures consistency and grabs attention of users

3. Set a Brand Voice And Tone

After visuals, captions, and related copy are the next pieces of branding your social media posts. Sticking to an idea representing your brand is essential. Create moral guidelines and portray your ideas to your followers. Try to make known your ideas in a sarcastic or snarky way but it's informative. The most effective type of branding is doing it through people. People like to hear stories because it creates a shared emotion between the speaker and the audience. When the character of the story is sad, happy or scared, those emotions resonate with the person telling the story or in most cases the audience.

4. Create Video Content

Video marketing isn't easy, but when done well there's no better way to convert viewers into customers. Over 70% of marketers claim that videos produce more conversions than any other content. It's because video is more engaging, more memorable, drives more traffic, and holds almost every other advantage over written text. Benefits of using video content:

• It grabs peoples attention easily
• It engages viewers
• It helps to increase buying content
• They are memorable and improve brand recall

5. Make Your Content Appropriate for Everyone

Creating new, frequent, and insightful content is a healthy and necessary practice of business in any industry. Many companies choose not to allocate the time towards content creation, and in doing so they often fall short of their marketing goals. This means the content including what is shared on social media should be acceptable (language appropriate) , accessible (Anyone should be able to understand what you're saying) and inclusive (Consider all points of view to avoid offending a customer group).

Reasons Why Your Content Should Be Appropriate for Everyone:

• Customer's trust you more
• Makes you look like a expert
• You can build a library of content
• It attracts viewers
• It establishes your brand

6. Be Consistent

Consistency brings value through establishing trust, which in turn leads to better customer service, greater customer satisfaction, and more confidence in attaining stability. It starts with you as an entrepreneur. Consistency is how you plan not what you plan, when people are consistent in certain things. It becomes a habit and it creates a strong connection between what is happening and how it's planned. When you build a consistent relationship with your employees, customers, partners, and other people in your business, this habit becomes a solid foundation for the long term success and growth of their business.

Importance of Brand consistency

Most companies find it hard to achieve brand consistency, it is important to focus on it from the start. Building a profitable, sustainable business means making small adjustments throughout your life, and the entire company acts consistently. It has a better chance of achieving ideal and consistent results. Your brand defines you and the entire company, which is why consistency is important in business, brand, and marketing. Solid branding sets your company apart from the competition if you study the actions of powerful brands around the world. You will find that they are completely confident in strategy and implementation. The truth is that consistency is crucial when it comes to visual brands. Don't go and be constantly changing your colors, images,and fonts. It can make your brand appear unprofessional. It is important to remain consistent with your design. Some followers may recognize your brand simply by your visuals. Making sure your colors, images and name remain the same across all platforms will ensure that your followers can identify your brand. A signature color alone can boost brand recognition by 80%! If you take the time to focus on accountability, relevance and clear messaging, you can grow your business and build long - lasting relationships with your customers. We hope these reasons on why brand consistency is important will help to guide you in developing the perfect content strategy for your business.

7. Avoid Social Media Branding Myths

A lot of social media marketers are focused on getting their content to go viral on social media and get as many votes or likes as possible. Their aim? Get super popular overnight. They want more and more people to know their brand, in little time. Which is a mistake. Now. it’s simply not possible in real life to get hundreds of thousands of genuine followers in a few weeks on your Instagram account. That is regardless of how you see social media branding. Nor can you get an unrealistic number of likes or shares in a few days on your Facebook page. Of course, the attention they gain is almost always short-lived yet the potential damage they cause their brand may be permanent. Try and build a real relationship with your target audience by using social media as a tool. Don’t think about getting quick results. Rather, know and understand what makes your brand tick. Taking the slow and steady or the more patient approach will make your brand look more trustworthy in the long run.

8. Post Frequently

While maintaining consistency, it is important to post good content on a daily basis. How often people interact with your brand on social media has an impact on how much they connect to it. Creating an account on the right social media platform and making it look perfect it’s just the first part of the equation. As a business, when you’re starting out, you should aim to make the best first impression on your social media followers. Because that’s the first step in building a strong, long-term relationship with your target audience. It’s easy to lose your presence in the middle of the chaos on social media platforms. But by posting regular, informative updates, you manage to stay in front of the mind of your social media audience. You should at least post these many times on each social network you’re active on:

Every social media account is unique, so testing and analyzing your results is absolutely key. And in order to make sure they are running together smoothly, you have to ensure that you’re publishing engaging content frequently. There has to be a ratio that doesn’t make you look like a social media spammer. Or else you may end up having people unfollow you.

9. Create Multiple Accounts for Different Areas of Focus

If your company is large or has different sectors of products or services, it's best to have multiple accounts. The advantage of having these different accounts include being able to mainly - focus your branding, focus on a specific audience and serve up relevant content. The most practical way to do this is to create an organized content calendar. This way, you won’t lose track of your social media postings and will be able to make them a top priority. As you can see in the picture above. Microsoft maintains several accounts that address different areas of the company's endeavors. With their main account, they highlight corporate responsibility and general announcements. With the Microsoft business account, the voice is from the mascot and photos always include it. The Microsoft Education account is solely focused on empowering students and educators. Keep in mind that it is important to maintain a healthy balance between value-oriented content and promotional posts.

Different Ways to Approach this:

• An account per location: This is the most popular on Facebook because it adds a lot of location features for pages.
• A mascot account like some popular sports teams have
• Separate marketing and customer service Twitter accounts for those that receive a high number of inquiries
• Department-specific accounts for higher education

Action Steps You Should Take:

• For each account, repeat your branding consistency across them all. For example, one location more sarcastic than another fit its customer profile
• Take a look at what your offer and see where it would be best to divide up the focus

10. Optimize Your Profile Bio

Of course, as a business, you should be implementing Social media SEO. Your social media profile shouldn't look like an average user. Your social media profiles hold a lot more importance since they help you put your business’s message across to your audience. They give you an opportunity to pitch to social media users who are interested in learning more. If you want your social media branding efforts to pay off, don’t ignore the bio section of your profiles. Don’t leave your visitors clueless about who you are and what you do. Your business may be offering the best service or products, but what’s with being on social media if your profiles don’t reflect your values? A lot of brands make the mistake of adding irrelevant information to their profiles. Information that gives zero clarity about their business. So instead of adding random motivational quotes in your bio, use them to describe the purpose of your business in a few words. You can also choose to showcase the benefits or advantages of your company offerings in your profile description area. Make sure to optimize the content of your profile with relevant keywords along with a contact button to help people find you and get in touch.

Conclusion

Overall, no matter what business you're in, you should know that consumers are more interested in your brand’s personality. Understanding who you are as a brand and what you provide to others will help your business grow. Social media has become one of the most important parts of our daily life. It doesn't help users communicate, but it has also become one of the best tools for marketers in spreading awareness and getting user engagement. While there is no doubt that you should try to offer the best product possible. That should not come at the expense of creating and nurturing a positive relationship with your customers.