Build Your Brand on Social Media:

Having around 3.6 billion users from around the globe, an average social media user spends almost two and a half hours each day on social sites. To dive deep into it, a marketing report in 2015 suggests that the percentage of business owners on Facebook is 93%, 71% on Linkedin, and 79% on Twitter. That clearly explains that even business owners are no longer afraid to be on social media. But does being on social media the same as being actively growing there? Of course not.

Creating a personal brand is one thing but increasing your brand awareness, growing it, building relationships with the audience, and driving leads and revenues are multiple other things you will need social media’s help to achieve. But all these things don’t come easy or overnight. You need to put active effort into social media branding to achieve social media success. That means you need to adopt certain strategies and keep certain tips in mind to achieve this. Here are some tips to build your brand on social media for your business. 

What Is Social Media Branding?

The term social media branding defines the method of increasing brand awareness across the social platforms to connect with the target audience. This approach not only saves your time but also helps you get noticed by the wider yet potential audience and achieve your business’s goals effectively. 

2 Important Things To Know Before Developing Personal Branding on Social Media:

Before stepping into this and that of developing branding, here are two factors you need to consider consciously before you build branding on social media.

• Know Your Brand:

This might seem obvious or easy but as they say, easier said than done. That means, just don’t go on investing in branding in the air, but be fully aware of your brand or what it is about before anything else. If you don’t understand it yourself you will not be able to make others understand. However, having a firm understanding of your business, its mission, vision, and other such things make other things easier and helps you decide what efforts you need to put into branding to help achieve your goals.

• Know Your Audience:

Another important aspect you need to consider before putting efforts into personal branding on social media is knowing your audience. It’s far more important than you think. You need to be fully aware of what they expect from businesses like you or what are their preferences. There are multiple things you need to know about them. These include

• Knowing what age group your target audience belongs to?
• What are their likes or dislikes?
• What are their pain points?
• What they are already provided within the market?

When you have clear answers to all these questions, you will be able to boost your branding efforts and align them with your concerns.

Tips To Build Branding On Social Media:

The main purpose of social media branding revolves around getting your target audience’s attention and speaking out your brand’s worthiness loud. Here are certain things that can help you effectively achieve this.

1: Complete Your Social Media Profile:

First of all, complete your social media profile. That means, adding all the essential details to help your visitors know you and contact you. These includes

Profile Picture:

Add a profile picture that must have your brand’s logo in it. Make sure to keep it consistent on all platforms fro it will help the user easily spot you in the search results. But make sure the image should be of high quality and must not be of improper proportions. That means, one size doesn’t fit all social platforms, you have to consider the size for each platform. That is

• 250*250 for Google+
• 400*400 for Linkedin and Twitter
• 180*180 for Facebook

Bio:

Add a complete Bio that should be to-the-point, readable, and give a correct notion of what your business is about. The space provided by each social platform for Bio is different but make sure to do not exceed it beyond two to three sentences, else no one will read it.

Website Adress:

Add your website address to bridge your social users to your website. You can do this by providing a URL link on your profile. The best approach is to provide your website address on all your social platforms, this not only further legitimizes your identity but also increases your brand’s reach.

2: Set Realistic Goals:

You just not blindly keep working on building branding when you don’t even know what do you want to achieve from that branding. That means you should have clear goals in your mind about what you want to achieve. There is a term called S.M.A.R.T goals that suggests setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Bound. Here are certain questions that will help you set S.M.A.R.T goals.

• Is your goal to attract more followers? If yes, then how many followers do you want to attract each week, a month, or a year?
• How much do you want people to reshare your content on their profiles?
• How many website visitors do you want to attract through your branding efforts?

Having answers to the above question helps you determine the purpose behind your social media branding and helps you put the effort in the direction that matters and saves you from wasting energy and time on any other irrelevant thing.

 3: Leverage Your Contacts To Announce Your Social Presence:

When you are on social media you need to let others know about your presence. While it won’t be possible to get organic reach overnight, you can leverage your contacts say colleagues, friends, and family to follow you and further refer you to their friends, colleagues, families, and customers. This approach is necessary not just to increase numbers of followers or sales as your friends or your family may not ever purchase from you but they can be helpful because 

• Even if your contacts don’t promote your business, just them liking your page will help increase your reach.
• Over 92% of customers believe in a business and purchase if a friend or family member recommends them about that.
• Other than this, a considerable sum of 85% of businesses claims the word-of-mouth campaign to be their best tool to increase their brand’s reach and sales.

4: Be Consistent:

You may have heard this two words sentence often as it applied to almost all the areas of life. But when it comes to social media branding, it leaves all those areas behind. Although you need to understand that being consistent doesn’t mean over-posting as it can have a negative impact, make sure to keep your audience engaged in a light and healthy manner.

You can do this by creating a social media calendar where you can pre-schedule and plan your content to keep your publishing flow smooth and qualitative.

You can also set a posting schedule but you have to keep changing it with the changing algorithms. This might feel hard to you but doing this will surprisingly increase your reach and leads.

5: Help People Solve Their Problems Instead Of being Over-Promotive:

Yes, we understand that you want to get your message delivered, your voice heard but don’t go overboard with it. No doubt, you should be consistent in posting but don’t create every other piece of content just about yourself. It seems to be self-centered and will also scare your followers away.

Instead, you should make it about your audience. Think about them. What do they expect from you, what do they need, what can you do to solve their problems, or what can you create to engage their interest. One approaches ays that, out of your whole social media content, 20 % should be promotional and 80% should be social. That means you need to find other things that should help or interest your audience. This may include

• Things that are creative or humorous.
• Content that provides information and adds value.
• Something that will address a problem and provides solutions to solve it as well.

6: Let The Visuals Work Their Charm:

Visuals are one of the most influential elements in personal branding on social media. 

Visuals catch attention and are easy to grab than plain text. That’s the reason visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are continuously growing around the globe. Instagram attracts over 800 million monthly users and Pinterest 100 million monthly users. 

Even the percentage of marketers who believe images to be an important element in social media branding is 82%. And a considerable percentage of 52% believe videos boost ROI better than any other thing.

Video content can include behind-the-acne moments, sneak peeks of upcoming products, products in action, a demonstration of how- to operate a specific product, and more.

But if you don’t believe in the power of visuals here are certain things that verify the importance of visuals.

• Visuals save reading time and effort.
• Visuals enhance the presentation.
• Visuals provide context to the otherwise raw data.
• Visuals engage and make understanding easier.
• Visuals get the user’s imagination to work.

7: Utilize Each Possible Social Platform you own:

You should promote your brand on multiple social platforms to attract an audience from each one if it aligns with your business motif. You can link your profiles for this purpose. Multiple platforms also provide this option to link so utilize that option. Add your profiles to your websites, your website URL to your profiles, emails, and more. You can also add your profile’s address to your products’ packaging and other printables. 

The point is to make it easier for people to reach out to you to boost your brand’s awareness and revenues. You can promote the same content on each platform but remember that each social platform has different requirements than the others. One thing you can post on Instagram may not be something you can share on Linkedin. That doesn’t mean you can’t reuse/recycle your content but you need to tailor the content to present it in a way that aligns with each platform’s unique requirements.

One example of this is you can post an interesting fragment of your blog post on Instagram and then add a link to the full blog post in the caption. This way those who take an interest and want to read more will go to your website which will further increase your website traffic. So this is the way you can cash the audience on each platform for the other.

8: Avoid Ghosting Your Audience:

Well, the title is pretty self-explanatory. You should not just post content and then disappear. You should never ghost or try to ghost your audience no matter what. Be it comments, story replies, queries, direct DMS, or someone reposting your content, stay active and make sure to reply, communicate, and get engaged with them in any way possible. That means.

• If they praise something, say them Thanks.
• If they complain about something, try to amend their experience.
• If they want information, give them. 

If you can’t manage to reply to them all, try automatic replies, or hire a social media manager.

Building trust and loyalty is not an overnight task but adopting this approach will help you gain their trust and confidence and develop a soft corner in their heart for you. They will feel that you value them and their concerns and not just consider them a ticket to earning money.

9: Don’t Hide From Your Audience:

One of the biggest mistakes business owners do when it comes to building branding is they hide from their audience without realizing that their audience is excited to want to know them. Especially. If people keep an emotional bonding with you, they will love to know you personally.

The best approach to add a personal touch to your business is to communicate with them 

• You can do this by talking to them through questionnaires, interacting with them through quizzes or polls, or maybe telling them about your routine, your life, your personal stories. 
• Other than this you can also show people working with you. That means, you of course cannot run the whole business alone, you must have a team of humans that will be doing multiple tasks and not robots. So show the human side of your business.
• You can share pictures of an annual function at your physical stores.
• Birthday celebration of an employee.
• Behind the scenes of the team working.

Adopting this approach of adding a personal touch can help you build a connection with them. And they will also feel that they know you or are connected to humans and not some robot or faceless entity.

10: Utilize Advertisement:

No doubt, you can attract an organic audience, but that’s not how you can utilize social platforms fully. You should leverage the Instagram business feature fully, although not everything you get there will be free, if paying a small amount returns you a big and heavy amount, That’s not a bad trade.

What we are trying to say here is to experiment with paid advertisements. Multiple platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin allows you to run far effective, widely targeting, and actionable campaigns that just can’t be possible organically.

You have multiple options to target the audience the way you like. That means you can target a global audience, a lookalike audience, create an audience manually, or simply an audience based on their behaviors, interests, and more. And you can do this all for as low as $5 per day.

Not just paid advertisement, you should also experiment with influencer marketing as it is one of the most influential ways of building personal branding on social media as you can attract the influencer’s insanely high traffic to be your customers. But make sure to collaborate with the influencer in your niche to attract an interested and potential audience. But whatever you chose either, social media ads, or influencer marketing, both can drive you a drastically high ROI. 

11: Track Your Branding Efforts:

While, working to build branding is important, tracking if your efforts are earning fruit or not is even more important. That means, you just do not blindly keep putting in the effort but see if you are getting the results you want to achieve. Multiple social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest offer an Insight option to help you track your engagements, reach, following, visits, replies, shares, and more. You can also survey your audience to see if you are getting the desired engagement, do they recognize your brand the way they should be, or are you targeting the right audience? 

All of this is important so that you should know what is working and what is not. What you should keep moving and what needs to be changed to enhance the output of your efforts.

Conclusion:

Creating a personal brand may have been the first step but personal branding on social media is where the real hustle comes. While you may have a grasp on all the tactics to grow your business, one thing that is a squeeze out of all is don’t shy away from your audience. Build a human and friendly relationship with them, and the rest will no longer look like some rocket science.