One of the most overlooked aspect of social media marketing - and yet one of the most important - is to present a unified, standardized and easily recognized brand to the world.
With so many social networks to cover, maintaining a consistent brand identity has become a serious challenge that can be overcome with a few simple rules, a couple keywords like “authenticity” or “uniqueness”, and some good sense adapted to each social channel.
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Social channels require a specific approach since they speak to different audiences. Moreover, they also abide by distinctive settings and overall guidelines.
Create a standardized, familiar and recognizable social brand that will help build up customer loyalty. Doing things in order with a simple-enough process will get you all set for the next phase of your social media strategy.
Find a “brand voice” adapted to each social channel (e.g. “business-like” on LinkedIn, “casual” on Facebook, “funny” on Instagram….), and customize your basic texts/slogans according to those.
Document all these items in our company’s “Social Media Brand Guidelines”, a basic set of rules for social channels easily understood by all those involved, which you will append whenever necessary.
If you’re catering to various countries with different languages, deploy your basic strategy across language-specific, localized social accounts.
While building a visual identity is rather straightforward – especially when specialist take on that task - creating a unique voice for your brand is a whole different story.
As you can see from the graphic below, your social media brand voice consists of four elements: character, tone, language and purpose.
Character: your social personae should not necessarily resemble your ideal social interlocutor, but rather the one type of people that your ideal social audience would listen most to, and most likely want to interact with.
Language, Tone, and Purpose: as we’ve seen earlier, you should decide on what style is the best fit for each social media channel, and commit to it in your social media guidelines. Then find the adjectives that best describe how you’d like your brand to be presented to the main audience of each social network.
A familiar and recognizable social brand will reinforce brand recognition and customer loyalty.
Create sets of branded graphics for each social channel, adapting your visual identity to your target audience.
Enforce Social Media Brand Guidelines to avoid mishaps.
Define your brand voice for each social channel
Always remain human, authentic, and unique.
Online design tool Canva has a great resource about Brand Building through Social Media.
Consultants and one-man businesses should consider using social media to build a personal brand.
A great case for social branding in AdWeek: Marketing to Millennials and the Necessity of Social Brand Advocacy.
com has some valid points in searching How to Keep Your Branding Consistent on Social Media.
Thanks for reading this extract. This is just one step, and we have a lot more tips and tricks for you in store.
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