How to Build Your Brand on Social Media

 

Social media are like one big jungle. You need to carve up a wide enough path for your followers to reach your profile page and therefore your brand. To do this, companies have to utilize various tools and clever strategies to establish their brand’s online reputation and increase their brand awareness. Let’s take a closer look at a few of these strategies and ways of successfully implementing them into your social media campaigns.

 

Find your tribe
In order to increase your brand awareness, you must first find your brand’s most loyal followers, aka your ‘tribe’. These users will be your main brand advocates, and as such will act as your brand’s ambassadors on their own accord. However, you need to scout for the appropriate hunting grounds beforehand to set up a proper base of operations for your tribe. That’s why you need to do a detailed research and analysis of your target audience in order to adequately focus your campaign and get the best results. If you think you are not up to the task, consult with a professional, such as this branding agency from Melbourne.

 

Keep in mind that there are many social media platforms out there, each with their own set of rules and followers.For example, Instagram is a predominantly visual platform, with the target audience being mostly female. Hence, there’s far less engagement with followers than on Facebook, and a lot more visual content instead. On the other hand, Facebook is highly saturated with brands at the moment, making it somewhat overcrowded in that regard. Twitter is excellent for producing higher volumes of content at a much faster pace than other platforms, whereas LinkedIn is better for business people and businesses overall, and so on.

 

Establish your brand’s persona
Once you’ve chosen a platform as your tribe’s main HQ, it’s time to lure in a few settlers to help you establish your brand’s name on that site. For this to work, you must do two things. First, you need to imagine your average follower, what are their likes and dislikes, interests, values, and so on. By specifically targeting your audience, you can do the second most important thing and that is: creating your brand’s unique persona. Or, in other words, you want to humanize your brand by giving it human characteristics and traits as much as possible. Of course, the personality of your brand should reflect the desired traits of your typical consumer, as this way your brand is more appealing to them, and they’ll regard you more as one of their peers rather than a corporation.

 

Track and measure everything
Now more than ever, social media marketing is completely dominated by data-driven decisions. Hence, there’s a constant need for tracking and accumulating relevant data. Especially so when it comes to brand engagement, where certain metrics such as brand sentiment, the number of social media mentions and followers can help brands pinpoint the exact locations that could use some room for improvement. For this reason, media monitoring tools are recommended to help gather all the necessary data for your social media campaign in order for it to be successful. Likewise, the work doesn’t end here as you need to constantly be on the lookout for relevant signs in your data, followed by a rinse and repeat pattern until you’ve perfected your strategy.

 

Encourage user generated content
With the relevant data in hand, it’s time to create some engaging content that will snowball your campaign and spur your loyal fans into action. For this to work, you need to encourage user generated content by sharing the most creative and entertaining posts your followers have come up with, and thus starting a dialogue around them as well. Next, strengthen these communication channels by creating hype to draw in more users and thus expand the reach of your strategy. An excellent example of this strategy is Coca-Cola’s ‘share a Coke’ campaign, where the famous brand replaced its logo with random names on their bottles. This, of course, was highly amusing to a lot of people who went to post pictures of bottles with various names on them and tagged a whole bunch of people in the process. What started out as a small campaign in Australia quickly turned into a worldwide phenomenon, spreading to over 50 major countries around the globe almost overnight.

 

Build strong partnerships
Finally, in order to conquer the vast domains of social media, you need to bring an army along with you. Charging in all by yourself is brave, but foolish, and won’t bring your brand any recognition as it would if you employed a popular social media influencer, for example. These are excellent for increasing brand awareness passively, as they aren’t too aggressive in their approach. Another thing briefly mentioned is the loyal fan-base, as they do can make a difference in brand recognition. Nurturing and building lasting relationships with these two camps will help you immensely in establishing your brand’s reputation on social media and beyond.

 

All in all, work on creating an interactive community around your brand as more often than not it’s the people who are the main driving force behind a brand’s image.

 

About the Author
David Webb is a Sydney-based business consultant,online marketing analyst and a writer. With six years of experience and a degree in business management, he continuously informs the public about the latest trends in the industry. He is a senior editor at BizzmarkBlog. You can reach him on Twitter or Facebook.