Back to blog
Building a strong brand on social media doesn’t happen in one day. You need to have a strategy, be consistent, find your unique voice and a million other things.
We asked experts in social media marketing to share their tips on building a brand on social media and how to do it right.
From what they all told us, we identified four pillars of this process. We came up with social media ACES: Authenticity, Content, Engagement, Strategy.
Starting our mini-series with Content, let’s find out what our experts have got to say.
Always ask yourself one question about your content
Pollyanna Ward – Social Media Manager at Wickes
To build a successful brand on social media, treat it as you would any other marketing channel. If you paid someone to put up posters for your brand and it didn’t even have your logo or a picture of your product, you’d be mad. Once you have the basics of consistent branding, tone of voice, your key messages, then you can start to have fun with the execution. You could show off your brand with a picture, or you could show off your brand with an Instagram Poll to ask users which flavour they prefer. Just ask yourself after every asset you upload – would you remember the brand if you saw it?
Keep your clients in the loop
Jennifer Norene – chief adventure advisor at Beyond Brand Collective
Tell authentic stories about the day to day successes of your people, your business and your community involvement. Go live every week with your clients.
The key is diverse content
Lora Dimitrova – Social Media Account Executive at M3 Communications Group, Inc.
Building a strong brand on social media is still something incomprehensible to some businesses, but those who are aware of the power of online presence, it is important to make the right mix of channels to reach their target audience. It is also important to find out how often they need to publish content, as well as where to focus more – caption or visual; how long the caption should be, whether it has an inscription on the visual.
Make sure you do diverse content and use as much as you can of the potential of social media channel you are in. Don’t overlook the ad as part of the marketing mix.
Boost your content with relatability
Dan Kelsall – Creative Director at Offended.marketing
To build a strong brand on social, forget about authenticity. If you can’t be unapologetically yourself, you’re not authentic. Instead, go for relatability. Get to know your audience, and produce content that resonates with them. If you don’t know your audience, and I mean truly know them, you’ve already failed.
Make your content awesome & authentic
Darren Foong – Growth Marketer at ReferralCandy
To build a brand on social media, do what influencers do: Post often, post awesome, and post authentic. Most important first: POST AUTHENTIC: Wendy’s is famous for roasting people on Twitter. Pornhub Aria posts spicy memes. They’re famous for having a consistent brand voice over time. Develop a brand voice and a style document, and keep to that voice.POST AWESOME: Influencers spend a lot of time finding the right background, lighting, focus, and adjusting images afterwards. Low-quality photos and MS Paint Memes won’t do it any more. Whatever platform you use, make sure it’s high quality, or it’ll look bland next to the quality content of other brands.POST OFTEN: Social networks reward regular posts. If your latest post is from Christmas, your account may as well not exist. On Instagram, influencers post daily; for YouTube, it’s a weekly schedule. The key here is regularity and consistency – the timing will depend on your resources, but consistent posting (and even reposting) is the key.
Be consistent with your content
Adam Hempenstall – founder at Better Proposals
Branding on social media is deceptively complex. It may seem simple at first — and to some extent it is — but if you want to see good results then you have to be smart with your approach. The first thing that you should focus on when launching your social media campaign is a sense of consistency. Establish a constant theme, color scheme, and personality across all your social media platforms.
You don’t need to make everything completely identical but maintaining a similar tone and aesthetic will help customers identify your brand with ease. Watermarking the material you publish also ensures that A. it won’t be plagiarized and B. your company image will be engraved into the minds of everyone who scrolls by the post. You should also get creative with your biographies. Make use of a solitary emoji to add some color and catch the eye of users who stumble upon your profile. Regularly posting is another key factor, so use apps for automatic scheduling. Lastly, be sure to respond to your followers who comment on posts to encourage them to repeat such behavior.
Design your content like a pro
Alice Corner – Content Manager at Venngage
You need to ensure you are producing consistently branded output. Making sure that your logo is present in your visual content, and that you are using consistent colors, fonts, and designs across all of your platforms is a great and quick way to establish your brand.
Know your audience
Lisa O’Keeffe – Senior Brand & Content Manager at Day out with the kids
The most vital thing about building a brand full stop, is to understand who you’re speaking to and what makes them tick. Everything from their routine (to understand how and when they might be using different social channels), to their interests, age, gender and even things like whether they like watching videos or prefer quick images will all help you to refine your content strategy and maximise success. Consider how your audience could be different on each platform and how you might need to change content to match. Essentially, make an effort to find out all you can and keep learning – your audience may change as you grow and your content may need to evolve to as a result.
Don’t be afraid of testing
Tom Mortimer – Content Manager at Adzooma
Test things, and test tools. They were truly invented to make automation companies work easier. Automating some of your tedious tasks can unleash some creativity that can be used for writing more appealing content. This can help you to attract a wider audience and, therefore, to build some brand authority that leaves a strong mark on the social media landscape.
Tell and stick to your story
Marilyne Comyn, Communication Expert
Strong social media branding and consistent content marketing can generate awareness, sales and loyalty if done right. It takes time to build a strong social media branding, but authenticity and recognizability are key. Make sure you have a story to tell (and stick to it) and switch up the character of your posts. They should either educate, engage, entertain or inspire your audience.
Make the most of user-generated content
Mateusz Nowak, CEO at Niebieski Lis
If social media still have some unique advantage over other online channels, this is the first advantage associated with building relationships. There are many effective ways to sell something to people who are ready to buy, convinced of the brand. But it is much more difficult in competitive industries to build this readiness and here is the biggest benefit of building a strong brand in social media. A strong brand is a brand that understands its audience, is transparent, honest and gives unique value. It seems to me that there is less and less space in social media for professional and “scripted” content created even during photo sessions or in a film studio. Good content is content created here and now, preferably with the participation of the community (UGC, cocreation). Engagement is not overrated, but it must be valuable. Investing creative resources and advertising budgets in “soft”, image-oriented content is good as long as we can prove in numbers that it has a share in sales.
To wrap up
It goes without saying that content plays a major role on social media. Without it, building any relations with your potential clients and reaching them with your communication would obviously be impossible. However, there’s more to it than just posting a few creatives and wishing yourself good luck. We hope that very actionable tips shared by our experts will help you build a strong brand on social media: no matter if you are starting from scratch or if you’ve already been present on there for a while. There’s always something you can improve.
Good luck!
