Social media has huge potential for anyone looking to forge a stronger relationship with their audience and establish themselves as an influential voice in their market.

However, like any other channel, your social media activities need to be backed by a strong brand identity that will communicate your values and help you build trust and loyalty over time.

The kinds of organic content and ads you publish on social media and how you interact with the communities of different channels will all feed into a public narrative that influences every touchpoint in your customer journey.

If you’re looking to develop your online brand on social media for the first time or simply want to revisit your online branding strategy, here’s a guide on how to build a brand on social media in six steps.

Six Steps To Develop Your Brand In Social Media

1. Study your audience

Studying your audience in a social media context will give you a range of powerful insights for your social media branding. 

With a specific audience profile, you’ll make it easier to understand the kinds of channels, content, and USPs that your target audience are most likely to respond to and make informed decisions about how you’re going to strategize and execute marketing initiatives that develop the relationship between you and your audience.

If you’re a B2B SaaS company, your audience may be more responsive to long-form LinkedIn content that uses industry jargon to establish a rapport with your target stakeholders. If your audience is younger Gen Zers, you’ll probably have better luck with a more casual, conversational tone and snappy videos.

By studying your audience carefully and developing a detailed buyer persona specifically related to relevant social media channels, you’ll be better positioned to adopt the right communication styles and forge a stronger relationship with your audience.

2. Define your brand tone of voice

Once you know your audience, you’ll be well-positioned to develop one of the most important elements of your brand identity: your tone of voice.

Unless you’re in the earliest stages of starting your business, it’s likely that you already have tone of voice guidelines to use in your other marketing channels. However, it’s important to remember that social media is its own medium, and any tone of voice guidelines you roll out should be adapted to the channels you’re going to use.

By taking cues from your audience research, and the standards of what other brands in your niche are doing, you can set specific nuances in terms of formality, the use of slang, abbreviations or humor, and the content formats that are most appropriate for each channel.

Remember that although having a distinct tone of voice for your social media channels can help you stand out from the competition and forge a closer relationship with your audience, it should still be rooted in an overarching sense of your brand identity, and reinforce the personality of your content when your audience comes into contact with it.

3. Develop a content strategy

With a clear idea of who you’re targeting, the next phase of your social media branding journey is to start mapping out a content strategy. This will define the messaging you use, the products or services you’re going to highlight, and other variables that will help to publicly define your brand.

Building a content strategy is a topic for a whole other article, but here’s a brief overview of the main elements you’ll need to include:

• Your KPIs (key performance indicators), data integration firm Qlik defines these as “a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective”, such as increasing your brand awareness through a specific social media platform.
• A competitive analysis, summarizing the kinds of social branding activities your close competitors are engaging in, with particular emphasis on where they’re seeing the most success, and the gaps in their strategy that you may be able to exploit.
• A social media audit that reviews all your past activities on your chosen social media channels, what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons you learned from these campaigns.
• A content calendar, which you’ll use to produce a long-range view of the kinds of content you’ll post on your social media platforms, the frequency of posting, and any thematic concepts you’re going to use to bind posts together.

4. Align your paid and organic brand identity

When many business owners hear “social media branding”, their mind immediately jumps to organic content marketing and communication branding. 

While this is certainly a big part of the process, it’s important not to neglect the paid advertising element and make sure that your PPC campaigns are closely aligned with the organic elements of your brand identity.

This can present a challenge for many brands that are already active with organic social marketing, as ads and organic posts have very different formats and limitations. This is why performance marketing agencies like KAU Media Group have dedicated paid social services for developing “paid social campaigns that reach new audiences and generate high levels of engagement”.

Creating a universal style guide, and adapting this with caveats for the different PPC ads you’re going to use, will help to maximize the impact of your paid advertising while giving your audience a cohesive sense of your brand identity, no matter how they encounter you.

5. Strategize for influencer collaborations

Engaging in employee advocacy programs or posting behind-the-scenes content can help to humanize your brand, but one of the more effective ways to develop your online brand is to network and collaborate with influencers in your niche by sharing your digital business card.

As influencers are individual content creators with no permanent affiliation to a specific company, they’re often thought of as more authentic than branded accounts and can be a great conduit for forging more personal connections with your audience. 

Just remember to invest in influencer partnerships with creators whose audience shows a clear overlap with yours, and who are discerning enough that they’ll show a genuine interest in your product or service, rather than posting something too dry or “boilerplate”.

By promoting your products or services through influencer collaborations, you can accelerate your social branding while tapping into a pre-built, pre-engaged audience who’s already shown interest in your content topics.

6. Monitor KPIs, adapt, and be visible

Building your brand on social media should give your future marketing efforts a solid foundation, but it’s not a one-off project that you can tick off and forget. 

Effective social branding requires you to monitor your KPIs closely and adapt campaigns-in-progress based on your results, both on a platform level, and for your broader approach to your social media brand identity.

Aside from this, it’s also important to make time to monitor communications from your audience across your social media platforms, and interact with them in a way that’s visible and true to your brand identity.

Actively addressing your audience’s questions, feedback, or issues on the public forum of social media will not only show people you care about your customers’ experience, but also open another communication channel you can use to distinguish your brand identity, build a sense of trust with your audience, and foster a more authentic image.

Conclusion

The social media marketing arena is fast-moving and fiercely competitive, but with a proactive approach to branding, you can carve out a distinct identity for your business and build stronger ties with your target audience.

We hope this guide has given you a solid starting point for defining your brand, building better content, and asserting your brand identity in your market niche.