Brand Building on Social Media – Fastest Path to Public Recognition
Brand Building on Social Media can be Effective When Done Right, but it can also backfire when done poorly so make sure your social content is on point with these tips.
Social networks have opened a door to a whole new world of opportunities for advertising. It’s not just advertising that brings short-term results and temporary boost in sales, but a more comprehensive promotion that can affect your company’s image in the long run. Using social media platforms is a great way to build a brand, promote its values and set up a community around it. Surely, the point of running a business is to make money, but to achieve true success in business, building a community around your brand is one of the best roads to take. If you do this properly, profits will come as a natural consequence. Here are a few tips on how to use social media to for brand building effectively.
Determine your target audience
First of all, you should keep in mind that you’re not addressing everyone out there, nor is it possible to communicate with all users of social networks. Naturally, you’re aiming primarily at those who might be interested in your product. Given your product, your industry and the values you wish to promote, you should have a pretty good idea about who your target audience is. However, you’ll have to consult analytics offered by all major social networks to determine exactly which demographics you need to aim at.
Once you’ve done all this, make sure you define topics you’ll deal with and the voice of your brand that should be used to communicate to your audience. Remember that your social media strategy should be focused on appealing to your potential customers in the long run, not on making immediate profit. It can never be stressed strongly enough that you’re not just creating content for your audience – at the end of the day, you’re building a community. Make your language and your approach understandable and relatable to your followers and don’t change it. Your voice has to be constant and relatable enough for your customers to begin to feel like you’re one of them, instead of being just a businessperson collecting their money.
Create useful content
Always keep in mind that most of your content should be non-promotional, or at least primarily non-promotional. The first step is to attract people to your page by offering them valuable and interesting info, preferably tightly related to your industry. What exactly this content will look like again depends on your target audience. As someone who runs a business, you should be familiar with the most common questions and dilemmas your customers have. Try answering them in your posts in an innovative way. Also, keep it as short and simple as possible because as social media are growing, attention spans are becoming shorter. You should aim to build an image of a brand led by a group of competent, yet unpretentious people that know their industry very well.
Finding that magic amount of content without overwhelming your social media audience makes social media marketing one of the toughest online marketing tactics to perfect, for more tips on how to craft the perfect content for your audience — click here.
Stay engaged
As it was already mentioned several times, the main goal of social media marketing is to build a community. Consequently, you shouldn’t behave as if you’re in any way above any of your customers or followers. Don’t ignore their questions and their comments. Sometimes you can’t respond to everyone, but try answering at least those questions that keep occurring over and over again. If they’re having troubles with your product, offer them help and try solving as many problems as you can, as quick as you can. This way you’re showing you’re knowledgeable, ready to help, down-to-earth and not essentially different in any way from your average customer.
Don’t just stay limited to your own pages and accounts, but seek to answer people’s problems with your product or brand all across social networks in general. By using media monitoring software, you can track what people are saying about you on social media. You will be informed whenever someone mentions you and you’ll have a chance to respond and fix potential problems. Also, you can use media monitoring to gather some user-generated content for your social networks. It’ll be easier for you to find reviews and comments about your brand around the internet. These are genuine experiences of your customers and among these you can find some very interesting and authentic content for your pages.
Listen to the feedback
Not everyone will like what you post. If you receive some negative feedback, you should try to carefully analyze it and see who it’s coming from and why. If it comes from people that are definitely not your customers or even your target group in any way, you should probably just let it go. You can’t appeal to everyone. However, if bad reviews and comments start occurring too often, you should definitely pay attention to it. Check if there’s something wrong with your product and re-evaluate your marketing strategy – never insist on a plan of action that results in bad blood.
Use influencers
One of the best ways to improve your brand image and awareness is to be associated with a well-known and respected influencer. This goes especially for those influencers who are known for their credibility and who won’t allow themselves to be connected with a brand that has bad reputation. Just make sure you find someone whose target audience overlaps with yours. They obviously know how to appeal to this audience (otherwise they wouldn’t become influential at all), so you can be sure that they will be able to present your brand in a fresh and entertaining manner. Their biggest strength is that the way they present a brand or a product doesn’t even look promotional, but rather naturally fits their everyday content.
Don’t get discouraged in the process of building your brand, your social media success most probably won’t come over night. You shouldn’t worry about it, since brand building is something that could take years to be done properly. Remain patient, listen to your followers, keep creating relevant and valuable content, and good things will start happening for your brand.
