A guide to branding yourself on social media

Social media influencer marketing can present businesses across the globe with a highly lucrative opportunity to expand their brand's reach and to engage more closely with their customers. An essential part of being able to launch a successful social media marketing campaign is creating a strong brand presence and image on social media. Today, we will outline some tips on how you can brand yourself on social media to enable you to create impactful social media marketing campaigns.

Identify your target market

The first step is to determine exactly who your target audience is. This will determine a vast range of things that follow in your marketing campaign. Without clearly establishing who you are targeting first, your brand will be unable to proceed with the remaining steps in building your brand identity on social media and progressing with your marketing campaign. Your marketing plan should establish the defining features of your target market, e.g. where they are located, which income group they belong to, their gender (if applicable), age group, consumption habits, etc.

Identify the appropriate social media platform

Once you know who you want to target, you can proceed to find out what social media platforms do people in your target market frequently use for soliciting product information, reviews and promotions. For instance, if you are in the beauty industry, you may find that your target market uses YouTue and Instagram much more than any other platform for finding out about new beauty products, brands, trends and techniques. Upon identifying your target audience’s preferred social media platform, you should focus your marketing campaign on that platform.

Set a theme and distinct style for your content

Your brand should be identifiable just by looking at the kind of content you post. If applicable, choose a colour theme that is followed in your posts. Similarly, you should adopt a distinguishable style that is common to all your posts. For example, your style might be to post promotional photos with a pastel colour theme, or shot in a natural environment, or perhaps a vintage theme across all your posts. It all depends on the ‘feel’ of your brand and the image message that you want it to portray. Even more important is keeping the theme and style consistent across all your social media platforms. This will not only avoid problems like confusion, but it will really enable your brand to be easily recognizable by social media users.

Post content that people will WANT to share

Your brand should put in extra effort into carefully designing the content you post. It takes a lot of hard work and careful planning to create a single post that people will love enough to share it with others. Keep a close track on your posts which have been shared a large number of times, and use that to improve your content as you go. SImilarly, keep an eye on content being posted by others in the same niche or industry as yours, and see what kind of content gets the most shares.

Create high engagement

The key to establishing a long-term, successful brand image is to connect with your audience as much as you can. Don’t make posts that ‘tell’ your audience what to do or that don’t try to engage them. The majority of your posts should seek to establish a two-way communication with your audience, making them feel like they are part of a conversation.this will allow your brand to develop strong, long lasting relationships with your customers. You can create high engagement by frequently running small competitions or giveaways on your social media, or by asking for their opinions or feedback through your posts.

Be authentic!

The last thing your audience wants to do is engage with a brand that is fake or deceptive. An important part of being authentic is staying as transparent as possible in everything that you do. Try and share stories about your brand or of people associated with it, since people find it easier to establish a sense of connectivity with stories rather than bland advertising. Doing so will also give your brand that ‘human’ element, so that your audience will be able to identify with it more closely, rather than feeling like they are trying to engage with some emotionless object. Embrace the unique aspects of your brand and don’t hesitate to let your audience know about them.

Following these simple tips can go a long way in building a strong brand identity on social media. This is all the more important if your brand is in its early stages. The first impression that you give out to the public will have a lasting impact on your brand’s success and will be a crucial element in establishing brand loyalty. 

After you have successfully branded yourself on social media, you can now embark on launching your social media marketing campaigns. To make that job easier, you can engage with a social media marketing agency like Influencer Hub. It will allow you to reap the rewards of your social media branding effort by helping you connect with influencers to effectively portray the brand image that you worked so hard to create! Head over to this page to know more about how Influencer Hub can help your brand.