5 Tips to Help Create Your Social Media Branding Strategy

Every platform you use allows you to access a certain set of resources. This means that with your social media branding strategy, even with the same message you used a myriad of times before and the same brand image you want to create, you will still be forced to adjust to certain situational factors. When starting your online brand from scratch and planning for the long run, you might want to keep this in mind and include this decision-making process while creating a social media branding strategy. This will also help you manage and maintain it for years to come, which is yet another huge boon to your digital marketing effort. Here are several tips you might find useful here.

1. Start from your profile

Regardless if it’s your own account (in a case where you want to invest heavily in personal branding) or an official account of your business, you need to learn how to set up a profile that promotes your corporate values, as well as some of the best characteristics of your company.

For instance, on Twitter, it’s vital to find the right handle and learn how to write an outstanding bio, while on Instagram, your profile picture will be the key. Bio is also relevant on Instagram, although it’s nowhere near as valuable on Twitter. Facebook gives you the cover feature which, due to its dominant size, gets precedence over your profile picture. Needless to say, this is also something applicable to YouTube. Ideally, you would find a way to integrate them into a single homogenous unity.

Finally, when it comes to LinkedIn, this platform requires by far the most diligence. The closest comparison of making your LinkedIn page (even branded one) would be to make a parallel with making a personal resume.

2. Picking the right platform

The next thing you should understand is that in 2018, you need to be omnipresent on social media. You need to have profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat and even Pinterest. On the other hand, it is impossible to assume that you can achieve the same level of content-commitment on all of these platforms, which is why you should learn how to assign priorities.

For instance, the female audience is more oriented towards Pinterest, while they are also a majority on Facebook and most other networks. The teen audience usually gravitates towards Snapchat, while they also use Instagram considerably more than Facebook. Overall, by picking the demographic-appropriate platform and setting it as your main priority, you will make your overall efforts much more cost- and effort-effective.

3. Abandoning one-size-fits-all principle

As you might have noticed, there are no specific examples of what to do or what not to do so far on this list. This is mostly because generalization and one-size-fits-all solutions often backfire when it comes to branding. What’s appropriate for one business can be ineffective or even counter-effective for other. What’s ideal for one market, may sound offensive do other. In other words, you need to learn all the basic principles of social media branding, without adopting prejudices or myths about 100 percent effective or ineffective techniques.

For instance, the greatest problem starts when a nonprofit organization tries to implement methods used in e-commerce branding. To avoid this confusion and counterproductive mindset, try to look for branding experts specializing in nonprofit marketing.

4. Set the tone

The reason why social media marketing is so effective is due to the fact that you get a privilege of communicating with people on a personal level. In other words, regardless if you’re a company or an individual, they will use that little information they have about you in order to make out your characteristics. What you need is for these to be in agreement with the message you aim to send.

This can be achieved by setting your tone and voice and being consistent. If you aim to use humor in your post, try to keep it in the same style all the time. Being a skeptic and being a pun lover don’t really go hand in hand, although both of these styles can be appropriate on separate occasions. As for the attitude, writing style and opinions you represent on some hot or recurring topics, this is also something you need to figure out early on. Showing even the slightest discrepancy here can testify about internal inconsistency.

5. The format counts

Another thing you should figure out as soon as possible is your preferred format or, even more accurately, the preferred format of your target demographic. The written word may be seen as evergreen, yet, with the current attention span of the online populace, this might not be the most effective outreach method. This is why you should probably turn towards video creation and podcasting. Videos alone are a powerful social media format, seeing as how there’s a statistic that claims that about 100 million hours of videos get seen on Facebook every single day.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, even with the best of guides, you still have a lot of tough choices to make, some of which will affect the future of your entire business. This is why it’s so important that your decisions are based on facts, data and actionable information instead of gut feeling or someone else’s experience.