5 Essentials of a Successful Social Media Branding Strategy

– Courtesy photo

By Daniela McVicker

These days, brands use social media to accomplish many things. Social media platforms can be used for content marketing, customer service, brand growth, even direct sales. Done right, social media strategy is perfect for reaching out to your target audience.

While the purpose of social media is clear, making it work for you isn’t as easy to master. It’s hard to find a brand that isn’t on social media. This leads to a lot of competition and saturation. It’s difficult to stand apart without effective branding. The following are essential elements of a successful social media branding strategy.

1. Pay Close Attention to Visuals

Your social media presence should be instantly recognizable. You can accomplish this by using visuals to your advantage. When your followers see your posts or encounter your pages, they should recognize your brand immediately. To do this, you must be consistent.

Here are a few tips:

• Use the same logo and tagline across social media platforms.
• Develop a unique color palette and make it the focal point of all of your visual content.
• Use templates, build a visual assets library, even use the same filters to maintain visual consistency.

See how the Virgin brand is using their logo for many of their sub-brands:

– Courtesy photo / logodesignlove.com/stretching-the-virgin-logo

2. Stick with The Right Topics

Content curation is a very useful social media strategy for branding. By using it, you are able to provide your audience with a steady stream of relevant and engaging content. They key is finding the right content. Unfortunately, many brands never create a clear strategy. Instead, they simply share whatever seems to be popular. The result is a random mix of content that doesn’t do anything to help your branding efforts.

To combat this, identify a few topic areas. These should be relevant to your brand, and interesting to your target audience. For example, if you’re a beauty brand you might focus on sharing content related to self-care, wellness, fashion, and beauty news and trends.

3. Foster Connections with Influencers That Can Enhance Your Branding Efforts

Larger, well-known brands have a built-in guarantee of engagement. When they Tweet or post a picture to Instagram, they’ll get responses and shares. Small businesses and startups don’t have that luxury, because they don’t have a large audience of followers.

You can make up for this by developing relationships with influencers that are relevant to your audience. Reach out to influencers early on, then focus on earning their engagement and approval.

4. Find Your Voice and Use It

Branding is largely about personality. An energy drink brand like Monster may be young, intense, and energetic. A company that provides retirement advice and investment services is likely to be friendly yet authoritative.

What you say is important, but so is how you say it. The voice you use in social media strategy for marketing should be sincere, and reflect your overall branding.

5. Use Your Profile to Your Advantage

Be thorough when you fill out your social media profiles. Take time to fill out any information about your company’s mission, history, and values. Link to your website and your other social media profiles. Remember that your profiles aren’t simply something you must complete in order to have social media accounts. They are another opportunity to communicate your branding.

Final Thoughts

Social media is a powerful branding tool. Just keep in mind that your ability to use it successfully requires you to have a successful social media strategy in place.

Daniela McVicker is a blogger with a rich experience in writing about UX design, content planning, and digital marketing. Currently, she is the chief contributor at Topwritersreview where she helps individuals and organizations improve their web content writing, design, and planning skills. 

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