Gone are the days when building a brand required a massive funding, unending promotional events, considerable airtime (which wasn’t cheap), and many other tactics that were usually far from easy to pull off. Today, you can create an unforgettable brand on a shoestring budget and in an unbelievably short period. However, it all depends on your approach and the tools you use.
Getting Around Social Media Branding
One of the best ways to create a brand today is through social media. It’s free for the most part, accessed by millions of users every day, and isn’t too challenging to get the desired results. So, how do you go about it?
The following are the top 5 strategies for building a huge following on social media:
1. Post Quality Content, and Post Regularly
Believe it or not, the success of a social media campaign is all in the numbers. So, the more frequently you share something through your Facebook page or your Twitter handle, the more fans/followers you get.
Social media analytics company conducted a study in which it analyzed roughly 36 million Twitter accounts and 28 billion tweets to find a relation between the frequency or tweets and the followers. Here’s what it found:
- A Twitter user who has tweeted as many as 1,000 times has 51 to 100 followers on average
- A Twitter user who has tweeted more than 10,000 times has 1,000 to 5,000 followers
- A Twitter user who has tweeted more than 15,000 times has 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers
So, can you see a pattern? The more active you are on the social media platforms, the more brand engagement you can enjoy and more people you can get excited about your brand.
However, high activity shouldn’t compromise the quality of your content. Your posts should always be meaningful and of good quality. You should also identify the subjects, content formats, etc. that your followers are liking the most so that you can optimize your campaigns accordingly.
2. Network with Influencers
There are general social media users, and then there are the “influencers”, who, as you can imagine “influence” the opinions of the former through their own opinions and shared content. These are the social media celebs that hundreds of thousands of users follow. So, would you benefit by networking with them? Of course, you will!
Marketing experts are of the unanimous opinion that all brands can benefit from some form of influencer marketing. You just need to learn the ropes of it and find the right influences to take your brand in the right direction and help expand your customer base.
The following are some of the main things to learn about influencer marketing:
- An influencer is a social media user that helps promote your brand to the masses.
- Influencers generally promote brands through videos, social media posts, blogs, etc.
- You can easily find influencers by using hashtags related to your products or services. There are many platforms/tools that help you discover influencers instantly as well. However, a lot of these are paid. Examples include Little Bird, Traackr, etc.
- You don’t always have to pay an influencer. You can just offer your own products/services for free and ask them to promote them in exchange.
3. Create a Professional Company Logo
Your company logo plays a huge role in not only social media branding but the other branding channels too. From digital ads to blogs, you want your logo to be present everywhere to establish a connection with your customers and foster brand engagement. It can also help you stand out and capture leads faster and with increased efficiency.
If you don’t have a professional company logo yet, then you needn’t worry. Creating company logo design is now easier than ever, and it doesn’t hurt your cash flow too. Today, there are many platforms and software tools that allow you to create unique and highly appealing company logos in a matter of minutes. These tools use advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand your requirements perfectly and create a logo that’s ideal for your business in particular.
Once you have created a logo, be sure to use it in your social media profiles, digital ads, and even the videos you share (you can add it as a watermark).
4. Use Social Media Analytics (SMA)
If you are running your social media campaigns without using a dedicated analytics tool like HootSuite, then you will always take one step forward and two steps back.
Even if you have created a roadmap for your social media marketing endeavor along with timelines and short term and long term goals, you still need an SMA tool to achieve your goals faster and to stay ahead of your rivals (many of which are already using these tools).
The reason why SMA is so powerful is that it gives you highly detailed reports on your campaign’s performance. With it, you can see exactly how many likes your Facebook posts get, how many retweets on Twitter, etc. An advanced SMA will also tell you the general feeling of your customers towards your brand through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine learning. So, you can optimize your campaign and make decisions on the basis of solid numbers and measurable results.
5. Respond, Connect, and Engage
A lot of SMEs, especially the ones that have recently ventured into social media marketing, forget about the significance of “human touch” that’s integral to strong branding. They share entertaining/informative content on a daily basis and monitor the results carefully. However, what they fail to see is that in this, there is no emotional connection with the target demographic, only forced marketing.
If you want social media branding to work, then not only you should share well thought out and carefully-planned content, you should use the opportunity to connect to your customers as well as prospects that are just waiting for you to convert them into customers.
So, when you share any type of content on social media, then respond to the comments, ask interesting questions, run creative promo events and let the users have fun too. Also, make it a point to respond to the messages you receive on social media. If there is a complaint, resolve it immediately. If there is constructive feedback, then thank the person and do something about it.
In Conclusion
Social media branding can be extremely powerful when done right. That said, it usually comes with a learning curve, which if you are willing to go through, you can expect a substantial following that only grows with time. Good luck!
