In the age where social media is the primary tool we all use to promote our brands, we need to acknowledge that the most crucial aspect of using social media is establishing our brand identity. Whether you’re a social media manager who manages several brands or someone who is looking to hire a social media manager, you need to have a clear plan as to what your brand identity is going to be. This involves knowing your audience, establishing your brand’s personality and having consistency across all your social media platforms.
When starting to establish your brand’s identity on social media, remember that this is a process. Growing your audience is much like building any other relationship; it takes time. In the end, a proper strategy combined with creating your brand identity, much like a relationship, will allow you to have a stronger connection with your audience that holds a deep level of trust.
Who Is Your Audience?
Knowing your audience is an absolute necessity when mastering your brand’s identity. This aspect should have been defined from the moment you created your product or service. You should have a solid idea of who your audience is. It is often said that when you market to everyone, you’re marketing to no one. In other words, when writing your social media content, write it as if you’re talking to one individual rather than everyone who follows your brand. When you create content by really understanding who your audience is, you’ll be able to truly connect with them.
Some questions you should be asking yourself when establishing your brand’s identity include the following:
Who is my product or service made for?
What is my audience looking to get out of following my brand over others?
What type of personality does my audience generally have?
Do they enjoy a more fun tone, or would they respect something more intellectual and serious?
What demographic is the majority of my audience?
These may seem like evident questions to ask yourself when building your brand on social media, but you’ll see the results as you begin to see the engagement spike with each of your posts. By looking through this type of lens, your audience will begin to connect with your brand. You are putting your brand in a position of thought leadership when your users start connecting with you.
Find Your Adjectives and Stick to Them
This next aspect of developing your strategy ties in with knowing your audience. You need to know what type of personality you want your brand’s audience to see, which means choosing the adjectives you want to use to describe your brand. This is a combination of not only knowing your target audience but also knowing how you want to describe your company. Unlike an internal company motto, this is something that’s consumer-facing. The language you use with colleagues and employees may be much different than the language you’ll want to use with consumers.
First, know what the purpose of your social media platforms is going to be, which may be a little different between each platform. Do you want to be educational and informative, or do you want to increase engagement by starting conversations? Maybe on Facebook, you want to be a little more educational and post fun facts and information about your industry, and on Twitter, you’re trying to get the conversation going.
You’ll also need to keep in mind that when you’re using adjectives to describe your products or services, it’s going to depend on whether you’re in the business of B2B or B2C. If you’re primarily working in B2B, you can be a bit more technical with your language, but this is much different when you’re talking with the average consumer.
One mistake some brands make is using technical jargon with their consumers to describe their products or services. Doing this can leave your audience scratching their heads and not understanding why they should buy from you. This specific type of issue is known as The Curse of Knowledge, which is when you inaccurately expect the other person to know what you know.
This is yet another reason why you need to know your audience. For example, if you’re selling cameras, you may be dealing with expert photographers who don’t mind some of the jargon. But if you’re selling a piece of equipment to someone who is looking to start a photography hobby, this person probably isn’t interested in the tech talk behind your personal equipment preferences.
Consistency is Key
In order to grow on social media, you need to be using all the major social media platforms that make sense for your business to be using. If you have a younger audience and can come up with some content for Snapchat or TikTok, this is probably a smart move to make as well. As you begin to create your brand identity on social media, you need to be as consistent as possible across each platform.
When discussing consistency, it’s all about taking what we’ve covered so far and figuring out how to implement it throughout each platform. Part of knowing your audience is understanding that some people prefer Instagram over Twitter, and some people prefer Facebook over Instagram. You may also have people who follow you on all of the platforms, so you need to be consistent with your brand style and tone.
Once you know your audience, you don’t want to be all business on one platform and then all party on another, aka the “mullet” of social media. This can cause a major disconnect with your audience because they feel like they don’t truly know what your brand is really about. So be sure to keep the descriptive words and tone similar across each platform.
Like we mentioned earlier, you’ll want to have different types of messaging for your content on the different platforms, but still remain consistent. Even if your Facebook page is educational and informative while your Instagram account is purely visual, it should all sound like it’s coming from the same brand. Whether you have 1 or 1,000 employees, your audience should always see your brand as one person.
Posting is Great, but Engagement is Better
It takes a lot of work to understand how the various social media platform algorithms work. Our team devotes a lot of time to staying up-to-date with the changes and trends for each platform. One thing that’s important for measuring success on each platform is engagement. Engagement is your golden ticket to reaching a broader audience and building your following.
Many brands start out with a social media following of their current customers or businesses they work with, and it’s also common to have friends and family follow the accounts. Eventually, though, companies might start to get frustrated because they’re posting content consistently and following all of the above suggestions, but still aren’t seeing any growth. This may mean that they aren’t reaching new potential clients and customers.
When we’re working with our own clients or consulting, one of the most common issues we see is that they aren’t focusing on engagement. Engagement is what social media algorithms are looking for, and accounts with strong engagement are the ones who accel in organic reach and overall growth.
Each time you’re going to post, ask yourself these applicable questions:
Will this post get retweeted/shared?
Will people re-share this post on their own Instagram story?
Will this post get likes and comments?
Will people be likely to tag their friends?
Finally, make sure you’re mixing it up. If the intention of every single one of your posts is to try and convert sales, that’s not the type of account people are going to want to follow. Provide your audience with value. If you use the 80/20 rule by providing the audience with more value than you’re trying to get from them, the conversions will come.
For a little brand inspiration, we recommend studying some of the best brands out there who are doing a stellar job with their brand identity on social media. Here are a few of our favorites:
As one of the leading business media brands, Fast Company knows their brand’s adjectives and sticks to them. Their platforms are consistent; discussing business, technology, and design, yet created to speak to each platform’s audience individually.
For most, Linkedin is the number one platform that comes to mind when thinking about networking on a professional level. Why? Because Linkedin knows how to speak to their audience, making their platform feel more personalized than others.
By promoting a lifestyle full of adventure along with using mostly user-generated content, GoPro does a great job of selling their product without promoting it themselves.
After implementing the above process into your company’s marketing strategy, you will no doubt be on the right track to having just created a beautiful brand for your company. For further tips and tricks on how to take your personal brand to the next level, you can find a copy of our CEO and Co-Founder’s book, PLATFORM: The Art and Science of Personal Branding at your nearest bookstore or on Amazon.
