Most businesses today understand the importance of having a social media strategy to run alongside the rest of your online marketing efforts. Social media is a fantastic way to gain new fans and subscribers, is usually free to use and offers an excellent platform from where you can influence potential customers to take notice of your brand.
Social media is also an important place for you to build your brand, and this requires you to use the right methods and strategies across the different channels in order to engage better with your target audience.
Here are some of the ways in which you can build a successful social media brand.
Choose The Right Platforms
Before you can start building your brand you need to find the right social media platforms to showcase your business. It is useful to have a selection of different platforms, rather than focusing your efforts on one or two main ones, but the ones you choose should be personal to your business and what it is that you are hoping to achieve.
For example, Facebook offers a place where you can share content and information, giving a better overview of your company for a wider audience. Twitter tends to be better suited to a younger audience, and allows you to share news and information. Instagram is a purely visual medium, which has the youngest following of all, and requires a very different approach to draw attention.
The platforms that you choose will influence the type of audience your marketing efforts generate, as well as their responsiveness to it.
Research Your Audience
You can’t start aiming your brand at your target audience if you don’t know who they are, so you need to start looking into who exactly it is that your product or service appeals to.
You want to come up with a specific, tailored approach to social media marketing that not only fits the platform, but also fits the audience. This will require some market research and looking in-depth into the content put out by the pages and brands that your target market already follow.
Create Valuable Content
To ensure engagement, all of the content that your brand puts out on social media needs to be interesting and valuable. You want your audience to look at your content and want to share it with their network, and for this to happen it will need to be something they haven’t seen before and something that will make them want to talk about it.
Ask yourself:
- What do my followers typically share?
- What content offers the most value to my target audience?
- Is this something that is going to inspire conversation?
- Why am I putting this content out?
Focus On Design
Your design should be consistent across all of your social media content and should draw the eye and stand out from the crowd. The human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text, meaning that this is your first chance to make a stellar first impression.
Work On Your Voice
Having a ‘brand voice’ helps people to understand your business better and start to feel as though they know and trust your company. A voice is something that should be consistent across all of your marketing, and indicates to the viewer the personality of your business.
Two of the things that you should bear in mind when creating your brand voice are:
- It is best to avoid templates. Templates will make putting out social media content quick and easy but makes it impossible to sustain a voice of your own. It doesn’t matter how good your content it, a template will make it look formulaic and dull, and prompt people to skip over it in double time.
- Make sure subtle branding is present in everything. This does not mean that you have to go over the top, making sure that every heading looks the same and every other image is a logo (in fact this could easily begin to look like a template). Keep it subtle but ensure that every piece of content you put out looks like your brand. You could make sure that all of the colours you use coordinate with your brand’s logo, as an example.
Post Frequently
The amount that you post will depend entirely on the social media platform that you are using, but it is critical that your brand meets the eye of your audience almost every day. On Instagram you may want to post twice a day to keep your brand on people’s feeds, whilst on Twitter you will need to post far more often to compete with the rest of your followers’ posts. Whatever you do, just make sure that each post is unique and useful, or you may lose your engagement.
Be Consistent
Alongside deciding your brand’s voice, you will want to decide what your message is. This could tie in with your overall goal, or the kind of feeling you intend your brand to evoke in your customers.
Once you know this, make sure that every piece of content you put out sticks to these rules. This will help your audience to connect with you better and establish a rapport with your brand that should ensure follower trust and confidence in the brand.
Work With Influencers
Again, this step is more relevant to some social networks than others, but internet users take the word of influencers very seriously so you would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to work with one if you can.
Identify an influencer that suits your brand and has the same target audience as yourself and develop an online conversation with them. Mention and tag them in your own content and see if you can get them to act as a spokesperson for your brand.
Respect Your Followers
Once you have started to build a following online, it is important that you maintain it by treating your fans and followers with respect and giving back to them. This means avoiding tacky marketing moves such as holding competitions where no one wins, making sure that you always respond to questions and comments online as quickly as possible and offering incentives for brand loyalty.
Wrapping Up
Social media users are presented with a huge range of options every single day, meaning that you need to hold up your end of the bargain as much as they do, or risk being usurped by a competitor.
If you do want to jump on the social media band wagon but do not have the time to do it – then why not talk to the team at MaxWeb. We have a huge deal of experience in this area, alongside online marketing in general, so whatever your needs are, we will have a solution to fit.
Why not give us a call on 0151 652 4777 or email info@maxwebsolutions.co.uk to find out more.
Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020 in Social Media.
