For your dream business, you have come up with some fantastic products to sell. You develop a smart business strategy and choose a catchy name for your brand. Even an incredibly designed website is up. Now, what should your next step be to attract customers?
Without wasting a minute further, make sure your brand has a visible presence on social media.
Social media is the most influential tool nowadays to make a business successful. Your customers are among its 4 billion users worldwide. Today, using social media platforms is the most effective strategy to run a successful business.
The Global Web Index estimates that in 2019, people spent an average of three hours every day on social networks.
As a smart entrepreneur, use this time to your advantage by showcasing yourself as a valuable brand. According to Lyfemarketing, 71% of customers recommend a brand to their family and friends if they had a good experience with it on social media.
Let’s learn some basic rules every brand should follow to maintain a strong presence on social platforms.
⦁ Cross-Promote Your Social Handles
The initial step towards creating a strong social media presence is to make your platforms accessible to the audience.
One way to do it is to create buttons for all the essential social media apps (LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube) on your business website’s homepage.
Moreover, once you begin sharing posts on your social profiles, cross-promote it on other mediums to increase the reach and ensure that it is visible to every follower of yours on every platform.
For instance, linking your YouTube videos on Instagram bio and sharing your tweet on Facebook will maximize its viewership.
⦁ Incorporate Branding Elements
Branding elements such as name, logo, theme, and slogan have a decisive role in brand representation. Let’s talk about each of these elements briefly:
Name: Your brand name is the most important element, as it defines your product/service. It also gives customers the idea of who you are. The more catchy the name is, the more recognizable your brand becomes.
Logo: The logo is the face of your brand. Having a professional logo design as your brand identity makes it easier for customers to remember you as nothing leaves quite an impression like a well-designed logo. Think of iPhone, and that bitten Apple instantly comes to your mind, no?
Theme: A brand theme is a representative of what your brand portrays and what audience you appeal to. Thus, you should choose a color that reflects your brand’s value and profile.
Slogan: A slogan is the best summation of your entire value proposition. What you are, what you do, or what service you offer can be summed up in a few words with a catchy slogan.
These elements are not only for your packaging and web design. You can integrate them into your social media platforms as well to differentiate your brand from other competitors.
⦁ Stick To An Content Calendar
An editorial calendar will help you manage the challenging task of handling social media without missing out on anything. It enables you to post consistently and always stay in touch with your customers.
You can create an editorial calendar for Instagram after taking into account the following global engagement statistics.
⦁ Optimize Your Profiles
The optimization of a social media profile brings in more audience. Adding the complete information about your business, including contact number, relevant keywords, and a branded hashtag, would optimize your profile and make it visible to the audience in search queries.
⦁ Build Meaningful Relationships
After creating a profile, you can begin focusing on strategies to increase your followers. A high number of following is a useful tool for brands to catch more eyeballs. Thus, brands must divert their attention towards building meaningful relations with their customers.
What’s the use of having thousands of likes on your social media pages when you don’t engage with your customers?
Reply to your followers on time and respond to each of their queries. The more you engage, the better it would be for the overall brand recognition.
Responding to both positive and negative feedback will work wonders towards building loyal customers for your brand, just like Macy’s:
⦁ Adopt A Brand Voice That Resonates With Your Buyer’s Persona
A brand that feels like a faceless organization without a human tone never appeals to the audience.
Customers want a response to their feedback and wish to feel relatable to the brand. A wise strategy to tackle this issue is to adopt a tone that strikes a chord with your target audience through your content and responses.
Take the example of Go Pro. The company manages to get their followers interested in appealing images, mostly from beautiful, exotic locations. It satiates the desire of their target audience, who love travel and photography.
⦁ Offer Valuable Content
Of course, that goes without saying, as quality content always manages to generate and convert more leads.
Don’t bore your audience by being sales all the time. Instead, create a feed that is a balanced mix of quality images, informative facts, funny posts, and user-generated content.
In addition to the type of content mentioned above, take a stand on social issues when needed. Research suggests that audiences want to know their chosen brand’s stance over burning social issues.
⦁ Improve Brand Awareness Via Influencer Marketing
Although not new, influencer marketing strategy remains the most popular way of maximizing your brand’s reach. It is human nature to get inspired by celebrities and known faces.
Using this instinct to their advantage, brands contact influencers to promote their product, and in return, the followers of that influencers find the brand trustworthy.
In the image below, you can see how the engagement level of influencers on each post can work for the benefit of a brand.
Research conducted by Hootsuite found out that 7 out of 10 Instagram hashtags are branded hashtags.
Hashtags are a fantastic tool to extend your reach and make your brand appear in the newsfeed of the maximum number of audience.
You can also trend unique hashtags and encourage the followers to posts testimonials and other user-generated content by using those hashtags and mentioning you.
⦁ Showcase Some Behind The Scene Fun Often
Getting to know the faces behind their favorite brand will help your followers understand you more and feel related. It makes them think that they are a part of the family.
As a brand, you can create some BTS videos of your product launches, give a tour of your office to your customers, and also can do live sessions on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.
⦁ Track Insights Regularly
The insights offered by social platforms like Facebook and Instagram are beneficial to get an idea about what works well. It also tells what doesn’t stir an interest in the audience.
You must check the insights and keep tracking them to get a better idea of carrying out your social media campaigns the next time for higher engagements.
⦁ Invest In Social Media Ads
Hootsuite research revealed that the potential reach of Instagram ads alone is 849.3M users. Posting ads on Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms can generate even higher revenue for a brand and increase its recognition.
Relying on organic growth alone is not recommended by marketing gurus. It would be best to work on both free and paid social media marketing to maintain a robust presence across all the platforms.
Wrapping Up
To establish a brand presence on widely used social platforms, one needs to carve a strategy that showcases a positive yet active brand image. You must show your audience that you are there for them and genuinely care about their issues.
To make yourself a standout among competitors on social media, follow the rules mentioned above, and share your success story in the comments below.
Author Bio
Erica Silva is a blogger who loves to discover and explore the world around her. She writes on everything from marketing to technology. She enjoys sharing her discoveries and experiences with readers and believes her blogs can make the world a better place.
Find her on Twitter: @ericadsilva1
