We all know how social media has transformed our lives as consumers and businesses alike. Social media is a great place to start if you aspire to become a brand and communicate with your target audience on a more personal and emotional level. 

However, you can’t just set up a few social media accounts with some pretty posts and expect money to start flowing in. Building a brand requires a solid branding strategy for your social media to help you stand out from the crowd and quickly recognize your followers.

What is branding on social media?

When we think of brands, we relate to something like Nike or Coca-cola. However, branding is not just about the logo, colours or taglines. Branding is not even limited to just large corporations. A brand reflects the perceptions of the target audience about your business. Branding aims to align these perceptions with what you want to convey with your product, and what better place to start than social media?

Why is it important to build a brand image on social media?

Social media is one of the primary and accessible options for every business to survive in the online market. Let’sLet’s take a look at some of the most important reasons why is it important to build a brand image on social media:

1. Great response from existing customers
2. A cost-effective way of branding and promoting your business
3. Strong network with users, influencers and other players in the industry
4. Long-term sustainable advantage through branding

So now that you know the importance of social media branding, you might be thinking- what are some social media strategies to get started?

Let’s find out.

How do you create a social media brand image?

Social media requires a lot of consistent efforts spread over a long period. It takes time for people to identify your brand amongst the clutter. But some of the ways to create a brand image on social media are:

1. Decide on your branding parameters
2. Keep your branding consistent
3. Create posts that people would want to share
4. Interact with your followers and the target audience
5. Prepare a content calendar and a posting schedule

To get started, let’s understand each of these aspects.

Decide on your branding parameters.

You have got your logo, your tagline and your business card, but branding appeals more to the expressive and psychographic aspects of what your company has to offer. Before starting on the branding journey, it is important to define:

• Brand Associations: This include Logo, Name, Fonts, Colours, Tagline, etc. For social media, you can even finalize some of the common templates, themes and colour palettes that you’ll use for your posts
• Brand Promise: What is the thing that your company promises to deliver to your customer? 
• Brand Position: What differentiates you from the competition?
• Brand Personality: What are the traits that your company would have if it were a person?
• Brand Story: how has your product//service evolved?

Ensure to highlight these branding parameters in all your posts over social media.

Keep your branding consistent.

Your business will likely be present on more than one social media platforms. While you should have separate content for each platform, ensure that your brand elements appear unified in graphics, colours, tone, language, story and personality. 

Create posts that people would want to share

It is important to Maintain relevance, significance, and simplicity in your social media messages. Think of what kind of posts would you share as a social media user and a follower of the brand? 

Another effective way to increase the brand’s visibility is sticking to a specific subject and sharing content that only revolves around it. This will help you foster stronger bonds with your target audience and develop authority and reliability in the eyes of your fans.

Interact with your followers and the target audience

Interacting with your followers is the best way to spread the brand message and showcase your brand personality by replying to comments, addressing their queries and even asking them for their views. You can also appeal to emotive benefits by engaging more personally by going live and launching campaigns that ask users to share their stories with the brand.

Prepare a content calendar and a posting schedule.

The final step in achieving a strong and cohesive brand image is to develop a consistent content calendar. This will help you pay enough attention to details of brand voice and tone and maintain coherent graphics and messages across platforms. If your audience follows your page and realizes that you do not post very frequently, they’ll be less enthusiastic, and their interest might plummet. Thus, it is important to prepare a content calendar and a posting schedule to ensure dependability.

How to measure Branding efforts on social media?

Building a brand image is a common goal, but how do you measure its success?

Some of the strategies you can use to track, analyze and improve your branding strategies is by:

• Conducting customer surveys to determine the level of brand awareness
• Performing sentiment analysis to determine the brand perception
• Tracking mentions, engagements and post shares to identify what works the best for your business.
• Conducting a social media audit to identify your performance and improvise accordingly.

Wrapping up…

Social media can open the doors for your brand to reach a wider audience and provide many opportunities. However, creating a brand image on social media might take some time and a lot of effort to help a company express its authenticity and establish long-term relationships with its customers.

Want to learn more about branding? 

Let MajorBrains help you create a brand that stands out from the crowd with our best branding services in Pune.