Are you facing the horrors of low engagement on social media these days? Are you worried that that will cause a threat to your customer base and sales revenue? Do you wonder what you are doing wrong regarding your social media campaigns?
Well, here’s a truth for you - social media marketing is not as easy a bet as we think. It is not just about posting anything you like about your brand and products and expecting people to interact with your posts. It actually incorporates a lot more than that.
To effectively promote your business through social media, you need to go through a complete process of social media branding. To cultivate your brand presence on social platforms in the right way, you need to be familiar with the algorithms of the various social media sites. You need to develop effective strategies, keeping the visibility, engagement, and goals of converting your social presence into sales. Your focus must be on turning your followers into customers.
This post is a guide to social media branding. Read this article until the end. You will get some solid social media branding tips, which will help you develop efficient social media branding strategies for promoting your business in the future.
Before moving on to anything else, let’s look at some interesting insights that reveal the importance of social branding.
- 92% of all marketers agree that social branding plays a critical role in their strategy development process.
- Over 85% of businessmen have observed a rise in the exposure and visibility of their brand through social media branding strategies.
- 78% of website owners have reported a rise in their site’s traffic through social media platforms.
These findings make it clear that social branding has tremendous potential for helping grow your sales. Thus, we have come up with 9 different ways to spice up your efforts towards social media branding for driving favorable results for your business.
9 Social Media Branding Tips
Here are 9 tips to improve your social media branding.
1. Identify the Right Social Channels
Many marketers lose focus in identifying the proper social media channels for promoting a business. The critical thing to remember is that you need to focus on those social media apps where your target audience spends most of their time. Sometimes it requires solid probing to identify this.
For instance, Facebook's user base includes a significant portion of the population from almost all age groups. Thus Facebook is a safe place to begin your social media marketing for almost all types of businesses. It has around 2.85 billion monthly active users, increasing every year.
However, Facebook might only help in enhancing your brand awareness but not for driving direct sales. To get more sales, you need to use influencers and professionals, which you will find on the more modern social media apps, such as Instagram and TikTok. These platforms are particularly effective if you are trying to appeal to the younger demographics.
If your business is about financial or recruitment services, LinkedIn would be the best choice for you. Once you identify the most relevant platforms for your social media branding, you are ready to move on to the next step.
2. Make Use of Live Videos
Videos are a great way to grab the audience’s attention on any platform. That’s why video marketing has become so common in almost all types of industries. Most of the social media sites support video formats in posts. If you want to have the edge over your competitors in the way you do your social media branding, you should make the maximum use of videos in your content.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
For example, if you are promoting an event, talking about it in a video will help you make more ticket sales for the event. This is because your audience will find your videos a more interesting and engaging form of getting information about the event. Promoting the same event via blog posts will get less engagement and fewer ticket sales.
Therefore, insert video links or directly upload videos into your Facebook and LinkedIn pages to improve your social media branding. You can also create quick and catchy videos to use in your Instagram stories or TikTok account.
3. Create Your Brand’s Story
The way you tell your brand story greatly impacts your social media branding. Storytelling helps generate emotions among the audience towards your brand. It is a good way of making people feel positively towards your business.
Once you can build an emotional connection with your audience, it will be easier for you to influence their buying decisions through any further marketing strategies. Besides choosing what story to tell, where and how you share it also makes a huge difference. For instance, publishing long and boring text posts on your Facebook page won’t benefit you much. But creating an information design and uploading it as an image on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter may be a lot more effective.
4. Leverage User-Generated Content
Smart entrepreneurs and marketers benefit from user-generated content, as they know and appreciate its value. User-generated content not only saves time for your marketing personnel but is seen as unbiased and a lot more trustworthy by the audience.
The more you leverage user-generated content in your social media branding, the more successful your campaigns will be. UGC contains honest feedback from your existing customers and thus acts as social proof for your products and services.
5. Use Social Friendly Images
Audiences are getting more selective regarding the kinds of images they pay attention to. Surprisingly, using stock images is becoming less effective. You need to create captivating images to get people’s attention.
Fortunately, you don’t need to hire a graphic designer to do this job. There are tons of tools available that allow you to download interesting vector art. Use this art to post social-friendly images for effective social media branding.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6. Learn About Instagram Promotions
Instagram promotions are in trend for social media branding these days. The more you familiarise yourself with the Instagram algorithm to learn how these ads work, the more you will be successful in your social media branding strategies.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
7. Use Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags work for social media branding in the way keywords help in search engine optimization. Make sure you use the relevant hashtags in your social media posts to highlight them for the right audience.
Image taken on Strikingly user’s website
Before implementing your social media branding strategies, spend some time doing your hashtag and keyword research. This can go a long way in providing widespread organic reach to your posts.
8. Utilize Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is among the best social media branding strategies for most businesses. Your employees probably have their own followers on their social media profiles. If each one of them promotes your brand on their personal profiles, you will get a whole team of advocates for your products and services.
They can also share their experience using your products on their social media accounts or write positive testimonials for your business.
9. Get Your Timing Right
Last but not least, our list of social media branding tips is to get your timing right. The key to successful social media branding is to put up the right post at the right time. You cannot get the desired results if your timing is not right.
It can be challenging for a marketer to simultaneously handle the posts on multiple social media platforms. Therefore, we suggest that you use the posts scheduling feature of the social sites.
Benefit from Social Media Branding Through a Strikingly Website
If you build your brand website on Strikingly, you can easily integrate it with your social media handles to get the all-rounder effect of your social media branding strategies.
Besides the usual technique of inserting social media icons on your site’s footer, we offer a special tool for you to add part of your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feed into your web pages. This means the audience can access your latest Instagram or Facebook posts without having to come out of your website.
Image taken on Strikingly user’s website
The right way to benefit from social media branding is to make it essential to your overall marketing efforts. Therefore, it is in your best interest if your website is easily integrated with the process.
At Strikingly, our focus is on providing you with the tools and features that you need for enhancing your marketing and branding efforts so that you can drive more sales to your business. We are happy to see your business grow and are here to support you in your web development and maintenance process along the way.
