Posted by Your customers are spending a lot of their time on social media. That makes it the perfect place to grow your brand presence. Here in this guide, I will give you a few ways using which you can grow your brand on social media.
Develop A Unique Brand Voice
A distinct brand voice makes it easy for others to identify your brand. Social media branding goes beyond the basics of a consistent logo, colour choices, and a bio. These elements establish a certain sense of brand identity. But, they aren’t enough to make your brand memorable.
To start, think of your area of expertise. Then think what sets you apart from others? This thing that sets you apart is called your unique value proposition. Find this unique proposition. It differentiates you. It sets the tone for your brand. Decide what you want to be known for.
Here’s why it’s so important:
There’s a flood of companies in almost every niche imaginable. That means consumers have an explosion of options to choose from. Dove remained just another soap bar until Dave Ogilvy started making campaigns for them. Until then it had to fight for its share among so many like competitors, all of who sold soap. With Ogilvy, Dove rebranded itself. The very first campaign with Ogilvy did something radical. It highlighted Dove’s unique formula that gave you smoother, softer, and more radiant skin. Women loved it. Yes by choosing to side with a section they alienated a big segment. That has its downsides but this also means that they became the first choice for a few others. Do you see the importance of specializing in something? Of having a brand voice.
A vague description of your business is the perfect recipe to not get noticed. With a niche focus you will get a very targeted following. Content fuels your growth. Social media accelerates that growth. Here’s a list of questions you could ask that will help you develop your value proposition.
- What is the one thing you’re good at?
- Will you still be interested in what you’re doing for at least 6 months from now?
By asking yourselves these questions you’re honing your focus. You’re giving people the biggest reason to choose you over others. We’re building a strong value proposition that people can emotionally invest in. You might now ask what has any of it to do with social media?
Most of your customers are already on social channels. They’re talking about brands, gossiping about their neighbours, discovering new products, making stories go viral, and promoting stuff. They’re also brand ambassadors. For them to be your brand ambassador you need something unique and strong. It could be humour that differentiates you. For Moonpie it is. They built a successful brand presence on Twitter 280 characters, at a time.
After thinking about your products and identity think of how you want to tie that to something that makes people follow you. Think of the edge you can offer. The example is from Twitter, but this works just as well on any platform. Social media users like and share entertaining content.
To inspire yourselves, bookmark creative posts from your competitors. Or other creative campaigns you can find. Use these posts to create your social media strategy.
To get them talking, your brand has to inspire them.
Here’s what 2ndKitchen says, “Social media is a great channel to give your brand a unique personality through voice and tone. Your social should take on a life of its own and provide the followers with real value.” – 2ndKitchen
Let Your Visual Brand Be The Inspiration Of Your Social Media Posts
On your website, you might stick with certain colour choices. That’s great. These choices form the foundation of your visual branding. Make sure the visual story that begins on the brand’s site extends to the brand’s social media pages. This is possible if you stick to a theme.
Here’s what I am talking about:
Let’s look at the example of Dropbox:
The bold array of colours and images you see on the brand’s site carries over to Instagram.
Look at the visual branding. And how they successfully replicate this on their social media pages.
How to do this for your brand?
To do this successfully write out a visual guide for designers to follow:
- Decide what fonts you want to use, what colours to choose.
- Create style guides and templates you want your designers and writers to follow. If possible create templates for every post type, say a particular style for announcements and so on.
- Create photos and videos that are in line with the theme you follow on your site.
Your social media accounts should ooze personality. Your social media tone could be filled with humour, or be informative. Develop company catchphrases and a personality that speaks through the copy. This becomes all the more important if you have multiple team members assigned to managing social media accounts. A distinct visual palette makes it easy to identify with you. This helps your lead generation efforts.
Develop Trust With Customers
Social media gives you the perfect opportunity to find relevant leads. There are buyers on the platform. It’s an effective promotion channel. But, more than anything else it’s a platform to build trust for your product. Social media is an effective platform to develop loyal followers.
A social media presence is the precursor to generating a loyal fanbase. So how to build a loyal fan base off social media? It begins with content. It has to be unique, relatable and engaging. And we saw examples of content in the sections above. Here we will see how to create even more trustworthy content.
To develop trust, use UGC. Your customers are always eager to talk about you. All they need is a gentle nudge. It’s no secret that millennials trust UGC more than brand-created content.
UGC begets loyalty.
In a bid to leverage UGC, Loews hotels used photos that actual guests were taking. To find these pictures, they started looking through Instagram photos guests had shared.
And started posting these photos on their Instagram channel.
This fuelled the #TravelForReal campaign. Seeing their content being shared on the brand’s pages inspired more and more travellers to do the same. They started shooting even more pictures of Loews’ properties on their own. This created even more UGC. All these pictures improved the emotional connection guests had with Loews. It built trust. Potential guests see what’s actually inside these hotels and get a glimpse of the world inside. And they loved what they saw.
Another big way a lot of brands weave the aspects of uniqueness, and engagement in their content is by letting an influencer do the heavy lifting. Influencers tend to share personal experiences with a sponsored post. This creates curiosity in the minds of people reading the post. Their stories are real. This realism builds engagement. Finding a relevant influencer can be a challenge. But micro-influencers are easy to find and reveal themselves with a quick search
Post Consistently
If you’re on social media to grow your brand, get downloads to your podcast or leads for your business you’re in good company. With targeting options you can generate qualified and targeted leads to your business. How do you generate a targeted audience? The same strategy that works on your blog or website will work here as well.
Post consistently.
The study reveals that people and brands who tweet more get more followers
To quantify
- Users that posted between 1 and 1000 tweets got between 51 to 100 followers.
- Users who sent more than 10000 tweets had between 1000 to 5000 followers
- Users who sent more than 15,000 tweets had between 100,000 to 1 million followers.
If you’re posting on social media be consistent with your efforts.
Here’s a sample schedule you can follow:
- Post twice a day on Facebook
- Post 5 times a day on Twitter
- Post once per day on LinkedIn
- Post 3 to 5 times a day on Pinterest and Instagram
Conclusion
This can be hard. It’s easy to lose focus. That’s why I recommend using a tool to automate the process. To post consistently, use social media scheduling tools. They let you queue up a set of posts scheduled to be posted at set times.
About the author – George is a SaaS marketer who’s worked with several SaaS brands like CrazyEgg and ReferralCandy over the past 8 years. You can check his work on his blog.