Social Media Influence: Time to Build Your Brand Like You Mean It

Are you using social media to power up your brand?

Truth is, your brand can have a louder voice in a competitive market. It’s possible. I’ll show you how shortly.

Several businesses have leveraged social media to build a strong brand. According to Bop Design, “Global brands spend 45 – 75 % of their social media time on Facebook.”

Of course, you can’t build your brand overnight. Time and dedication are essential, because initiating and sustaining a communication on social media takes time.

But the rewards will be worth it at the end.

Without a strong brand, your business will not make much impact. Consequently, people will not trust you, let alone purchasing from you.

Building your brand is all about distinguishing yourself from the competition.

It’s about doing things in a way that benefits your business in the long-run, while you’re busy helping your customers feel more confident about your brand.

Social media is a great resource. Use it develop a sticky brand, improve your reputation, and stand out in your industry.

That’s why you should get active on the major social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter).

You can attract hundreds of thousands of your target audience from social media, if only you understand how to connect and communicate with them effectively.

At the moment, there is a huge acceptance of social media.

Recent studies found that 2.1 billion people have online social media accounts, 88% of marketers believe in the power of social media, while 75% of consumers use social media for their purchasing processes. More importantly, 23% of online consumers visit social media several times a day.

Social media, I bet you, is the most powerful branding tool that you can leverage to gain a huge online presence. Because, it gives you the avenue to interact with your fans directly.

Let me show you how to build your brand like you mean it using social media:

1.    Define your “business” objective

Before you get all in on social media, ask yourself this question: “what do I want to achieve?”

You’ve got to define your business objective. Yes, everyone knows that you can build an audience on Facebook, but why do you want it?

The harsh reality is, if you don’t have a specific objective, even when it’s achieved, you won’t know.

What specific objective will your social media activity support?

The consequences of not defining a specific objective before embarking on social media marketing for your brand, is similar to that of content marketing.

In order to understand the import of defining an objective and why you need it, a study by Content Marketing Institute revealed that 48% of B2B marketers that have a content marketing strategy don’t document it.

Sadly, most brands also do not have any marketing strategy on ground to follow. That’s a grave mistake.

Use the following checklist (questions) to breathe new life into your business objective:

• How many Twitter followers do you want in 30 days?
• Do you want to get comment on every post you share on Facebook?
• Do you want to create more brand awareness and get more links?
• Do you want to make 100 new sales in the first 60 days of using Instagram? through generating traffic and brand influence?
• Do you want to generate 10,000 visitors to your blog from Pinterest?

…And so on.

The answers to these questions can serve as your objective.

It’ll give you direction on which social media networks to use to grow your influence online. Don’t do social media marketing blindly, draw your road map clearly – and follow it.

2.    Develop a brand culture and choose social networks that supports it

Your objectives determine the way you structure things to get your end result. Your method of doing things is your brand culture. The culture you develop and use is what you’ll be known for.

Your brand culture drives the engagement, collaboration, and innovation that you’ll eventually pursue.

Your culture determines the social media platforms you need to use. There are a lot of social platforms – but not all of them will be suitable for your brand.

For example, here on Freepiks, we’re visual marketing company. We create a lot of charts, infographics, and visual content. Yes, Facebook is part of our strategy, but Instagram and Pinterest are our biggest wins so far.

Because both social media platforms are primarily for IMAGES.

Your objective determines best fit social media to use. I will give you tips on which social media to use that’ll serve your best interest.

i).   Facebook: Virtually, 70% of Americans use Facebook. Obviously, Facebook is the best place to create awareness and promotion.

If you want to grow your brand faster, work on your facebook profile to increase followers and engagement.

ii).  Instagram: If your brand is more on images, infographics, and overall visual content, like we do here on Freepik.com, Then Instagram may be the best for you.

Brands that deal on Electronic, Clothing, Food, Real Estate, and so forth, will be benefit most from Instagram. It also works well for celebrities, famous personalities, entrepreneurs, etc.

iii).   Google+: Use this social networking site to build a loyal connection of people who can support a noble cause. If you’re a startup company, Google+ can give you that initial boost, especially on the search engines.

iv).   Linkedin: This is the number #1 social media network for business people. LinkedIn isn’t good for making friends or keeping up with college friends. It’s strictly structured to help you grow your business.

v).    Twitter: As you already know, Twitter is a micro-blogging social platform. Use it to keep your audience abreast of recent happenings in your business, website or blog. Twitter is great for building brand, but you’ve to be consistent and active.

Better yet, schedule at least 5 posts to your Twitter timeline to go out every one hour. To a large extent, your success on Twitter is dependent on how frequent you tweet new content.

vi).   Pinterest: If you’ve a craft to showcase to the world, Pinterest is best fit for you. You can also use it to amplify your reach – but your content must be visually-appealing. I tried to use Pinterest to promote my blog, but failed.

There you’ve it, the popular social media platforms for building your brand, and how to go about choosing the right one.

3.    Create a content strategy

One of the best strategy that grows your influence online quickly is creating content regularly and distributing them.

I’m talking about engaging content that truly identifies a customer’s pain point – and offers an easy to implement solution.

Solving problems of your followers is like building a bridge link to get to them. When you create junk content, it will be thrown to the trash-can where it belongs.

But a compelling and problem-solving content will be shared by your viewers. This is how to skyrocket your brand image and build a strong social influence.

A few content writing tips to enhancing your brand:

• Your content should define your brand image.
• If you can, use storytelling and humor to convey your message in an interesting manner.
• Use images in your content to grow your brand. According to Forbes, 94% of viewers are attracted to content with images. That’s why content post with images on Twitter gets more clicks.
• Create content on a controversial topic – but make sure you’ve all the facts and data to backup your points. On the flip side, be careful how you impose your ideology on your social media followers. Such may be offensive to them, thereby destroying what you’re building.
• Create long-form content. Several studies have proven that long form articles rank higher in search engines.

Therefore, be elaborate in your content creation.

4.    Use a consistent theme on your chosen networks

Uniformity in branding is very important.

Your choice of color, logo, header design, layout, and all other design elements, should look similar wherever they appears.

According to AJ Agrawal, CEO of Alumnify, “Your company can create a visually stunning page which reflects your brand’s personality and message effectively.”

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Don’t use red color on Facebook and green on twitter. This singular mistake can confuse your target audience.

A consistent look makes your brand recognizable, irrespective of the platform or the level of competition. This is a very good step to building a social media influence.

We’ve been very consistent with our social themes. Take a look at our Facebook header and overall theme:

Now, take a look at our Twitter page:

Are you excited about the consistency that you’ve seen? I bet you are.

If you check our Google+ and LinkedIn business pages, the same brand consistency flows through, especially in our header.

Make sure that you position your brand in like manner. Trust me, you can’t contain the traction that your brand will gain.

5.    Design a logo that displays the brand philosophy

Your logo is your identity. Your logo should be a summary of your objective and ideology.  It should be a pointer to what you represent, therefore be skillful in your design.

Junk logos and quick design logos will not appeal to your followers.

Whether you believe it or not, your design will always affect your brand. In fact, 75% of users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on their website’s design.

If you can’t design a logo that will convert faster, contract it out. Hire a professional designer who knows how to put good concepts together – and deliver an irresistible logo for your brand.

This is important. Don’t postpone it. Don’t neglect it. If your logo sucks (you don’t need anyone to tell you), go fix it now.

Conclusion

In all, learn to relate with your fans at a personal level. Talk to them like a human being.

Do you want to build a strong social influence?

If yes, then stop seeing and talking to your fans and followers as though they’re robots. Infuse your personality into every discussion, and be consistent at it.

Eventually, you’ll observe that your brand is well known – both on social media, blogs, and even search engines (because you’ll find keywords related to your products or brand).

I’d love to hear from you. Which specific social media strategies have you use to improve your brand online?