When talking about branding, many marketers are still missing one crucial aspect.
A branding strategy doesn’t just include the typical elements that constitute a brand — its visuals, its voice, its mission, and its vision — but it also extends to a company’s presence on social media.
At the intersection of social media marketing and traditional branding, in fact, we encounter a new breed of branding: social branding.
Keen to learn more about it, and discover how you can build a foolproof social branding strategy? Our guide right here is a must-read.
What is Social Branding?
The expression refers to creating, presenting, and strengthening your brand across different social media platforms.
One of the beauties of social media branding is that, unlike standard advertising and other more traditional forms of branding, it puts companies on the same level as their target market.
This happens through enticing storytelling techniques mixed with next-generation automated technologies that craft messages that elicit a powerful emotional response in the audience.
Ultimately, social branding is what makes a company look, feel, and sound more “human”, approachable, and relatable, as it speaks to its audience through platforms that are entirely focused on communication, personalization, and engagement.
How Does Social Branding Help your Business?
There are several reasons why every business should build a social media branding strategy, and these include:
- Driving more relevant traffic into your sales funnel.
- Boosting a sense of trust, credibility, and relatability.
- Improving your overall sales process.
- Increasing your brand awareness and exposure.
- Creating better, more authentic, and more profitable customer relationships.
4 Steps to Improve your Social Branding and Grow on Social Media
How do you go about making sure that your company is reaping all the benefits above? Let’s take a look at our four favorite tips below.
1. Make Sure Your Social Media Brand Persona Is Consistent
Branding adds credibility to your company.
But that credibility can instantly crumble if you don’t maintain that branding consistently across all your channels — including social media.
LinkedIn is very different than Instagram, but if your company decides to be present on both channels, it needs to stay true to its social media brand persona.
This starts with visuals, which include your profile photo, cover photo, logo, and any other graphics.
It continues with your bio or company description, which should be adapted to each different social media platform yet still embody the same values and convey the same message each time.
Your posts will also need to maintain that same tone of voice that your brand has chosen, in order to protect its credibility and reputation.
2. Combine Automation with Humanization
Making the most of social media branding and social media marketing requires embracing a certain degree of automation.
This includes, for example, content scheduling software, analytics tools, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies like virtual assistants and chatbots.
However, you’ll also want to add a human touch, or your brand will fail to establish that all-important emotional and empathetic bond with its audience.
So, it’s OK to use machines and computers to aid you in your social branding, but it’s even more crucial to speak with your customers in an authentic, unfiltered, and approachable way.
3. Match Your Content to the Social Media Platform
While you need to ensure that your brand persona stays the same across all your social channels, you still need to slightly adjust the content type to each platform you’re using.
For example, let’s imagine that you have a social media presence on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Without ever modifying your brand persona OR tone of voice, you’re going to want to create and publish content that is suited to each channel.
This means, for instance, that you will need to focus on video content for your YouTube channel, share inspiring written posts on Facebook, and post attractive visuals to Instagram.
Think it’s going to be too much work? Well, not really.
You can repurpose the same content for different platforms, which makes the process a lot less time-consuming and a lot more effective from an engagement point of view.
That popular Facebook post that you wrote to promote your new, ultra-cool product, in fact, can easily and quickly be turned into a short-form video for YouTube, or a catchy meme or infographic for Instagram.
4. Create, Schedule, Post, Repeat
Now that you have strengthened your social brand persona, captivated your audience with personalized communications, and produced content to match your different social channels, you will need to publish that content and continue to do so.
Staying consistent and reliable on social media, in fact, is essential in order to demonstrate that you are a trusted, relatable, and professional company that deeply values its customer relationships.
But this, we know, is easier said than done.
Ensuring that you upload original, informative, and persuasive content with regular cadence is no easy feat.
For this reason, you should consider harnessing an automated scheduling software solution.
There is a tonne of these available online, and they are incredibly valuable tools that can save your team A LOT of time, money, and headaches, while at the same time ensuring that you manage to always stay on top of your social media posting.
Social Branding Examples Done Right
Now let’s take a look at some of the good examples out there.
Celebrating Every Body: Dove
For a few years now, Dove has well and truly embodied — excuse the pun — all the core values of the “body positive” movement.
And not only does the skincare giant say this; it shows it with tangible facts.
Across its social media channels, in fact, Dove gives plenty of space to women of all shapes, sizes, skin colors, and ages.
By doing so, the company seeks to demonstrate that it really stands by its motto around helping every single woman feel at ease in her skin.
The company also frequently launches social media and digital campaigns that are aimed at both breaking harmful stereotypes around bodies and beauty, and offering support to specific, more vulnerable categories of women.
The consistency that the brand shows across all its social channels is a testament to its mission: “Let’s change beauty together and inspire the next generation.”
The Power of Words: Dollar Shave Club
The shaving company’s tagline, “Shave Time. Shave Money”, is what a marketer’s dreams are made of.
Punchy, original, and memorable, it tells its customers exactly what they are going to achieve by choosing their monthly subscription as opposed to keep buying disposable shaving accessories.
Dollar Shave Club’s witty, pun-heavy tone of voice is consistently present across all its social media channels.
Take Instagram, for example. The company’s feed bursts with fun — yet super-clever — posts that are a genius mix of user-generated content, podcast excerpts, memes, and cartoons.
It’s no surprise that more and more influencers and celebrities are joining the company as digital advocates, which in turn boosts Dollar Shave Club’s brand authority.
An Online Shopping Platform with a Heart: Shopify
Shopify is not just an average online platform to support online retailers — it also explicitly wants to make a difference in the world.
One of the points of difference that this PoS platform likes to express through its social branding is its interest in social justice and environmental causes.
It does this by leveraging social media channels like Facebook and YouTube, where it regularly uploads informational and educational content that creates deep, powerful, and emotional connections with its customers.
Its posts are colorful, vibrant, and upbeat, which makes them even more attractive and viral-worthy.
Interior Living Inspiration at Your Fingertips: Wayfair
Homeware retailer Wayfair is another fantastic example of social branding done right.
The company boasts a solid Instagram presence, where it shares fun, interesting, and totally attainable ideas, tips, and inspiration on all things interior living.
By using easy-to-understand visuals and graphics, Wayfair entices its followers to go check out its product catalog by showing them how simple and cool it is to look after your own home — and to make it even more beautiful.
To further boost customer engagement, Wayfair also regularly launches giveaways, which are incredibly popular among its followers.
Oh, and of course, if you are tickled by one of their products and would like to view more details and maybe buy it straight after, you can do so right from their Instagram page, through Instagram shopping.
Wrap Up: Give Your Brand a Boost with Social Branding
Curating your brand identity on social media is paramount for your company to thrive in an ever-crowded, fiercely-competitive landscape.
A bulletproof social branding strategy should include a consistent brand persona, next-level customization, regular (and awesome) content, and a style that matches the vibe of the specific social media platform that you’re using.
Keen to learn even more about how to create an unbeatable social media strategy? Luckily, we wrote a great guide about this topic.
