Branding in The Age of Social Media

Most people see social media as an extension of real life, while others see it as a replacement. Whatever the case may be, you’d agree that social media is here to stay – and it’s not going anywhere. The number of people using social media platforms is projected to hit 4.41 billion in 2025.

That’s a staggering figure – and it’s why you need to take social media branding seriously. Simply put, your target audience is online, and you have to find them!

While it’s easy to build a brand on the social media ecosystem, standing out is difficult. First, the online space is somewhat crowded. For your brand to stand out, you’ve got to be strategic in how you allocate your time and resources.

Ideally, social media should provide a robust ecosystem that makes it easy to build an engaging community of consumers. Well, that’s not always the case. Nowadays, consumers can easily opt-out of an ad they don’t want to see. Furthermore, social media made it quite easy for the creation of subcultures of people – and that’s bad news for brand owners.

Why?

Because new ideas, practices, and cultures are brought to the social media ecosystem without passing through mass brands and mass media. In simple terms, large brands and mass media have lost control over what is being fed to the public. Today, people gravitate towards their favorite actress or entertainer instead of brands.

Branding in the age of social media is hard work, and making your brand stand out from other brands in the social media community is where you need to add some creativity.

But before diving into all of that, you’ve got to get the basis of branding.

Here comes the big question – what is branding?

What is branding?

How do you make your business known to the public, and how does it differentiate itself from the public? Well, answers to these questions give you an overview of what branding is.

Branding pretty much involves the process of making a business known to the public. Furthermore, it also shows you how a business differentiates itself from its competitors.

In other words, branding involves everything that goes into the design, phrase, or idea that makes a business identifiable to the public.

Now you’ve got a good grasp of what branding is, here is why branding is important to a business.

Why is branding important to a business?

Branding helps make a memorable impression on your customer, and also let the public know what your company stands for. Simply put, it brings clarification to your business and also helps your company stand out in the marketplace.

What would make your customers choose your company over others? Well, branding helps you identify that, and offers a meaningful representation of your business, and how you want it to be perceived by the public.

Branding is a good representation of who you are as a business. It helps mold the narrative that would be out in the public.

To fully develop a brand, you’ve got to put the pieces together. These pieces could be customer service, reputation, advertising, visuals, and social responsibility. These elements place a vital role in the creation of a unique and eye-catchy profile.

Now you’ve got a good grasp of what branding in the age of social media is, and why it’s important, next is to figure out how to grow your social media presence.

How does social media affect branding?

Social media plays a vital role in your company’s branding. It is one of the inexpensive marketing ideas to grow your brand. After all, people have the freedom of expressing their opinions. If your cards are not correctly played, you’d have yourself to blame. Also, posts that encourage engagement on your social media accounts are quite different from posts that are aimed at advertising your product (or service) offering.

For emphasis, if you want customers to share their stories, posts that encourage user engagement should be entirely different from posts that are aimed to advertise your business.

Let’s say you manage a bank. Typically, banks offer similar product offerings. And comparing the products across various banks may be somewhat fruitless. But the one thing that stands out should be their customer service. Even if it’s difficult to compare the product offering of a bank, users can compare the customer service experience across various banks – and that’s where the differentiating factor comes into play.

Imagine a customer is reading the countless number of tweets where customers are sharing their experience in a bank. At the same time, the customer is watching a sleek TV commercial by the bank. The Twitter threat pretty much encourages customer engagement, while the TV commercial is pretty much pure content that’s aimed at advertising the bank.

Most brand owners are somewhat afraid because of the uncertainty that comes with it. Even if you’re not actively using social media, your brand gets represented on the platform. Yes, employees and customers will say a thing or two on social media platforms about your brand.

Regardless of how you feel about using social media, you’d be represented there – and that’s why you’ve got to take it seriously. To get the most out of your brand’s representation on social media platforms, you’ve got to take both employees and customer’s feedback seriously.

Moving on, you’ve got to be original. Being authentic gives you an advantage in the marketplace. That’s how customers get to differentiate you from other brands in the industry. Once your brand is established through social media, it is important to inbound marketing goal to be achieved later.

Now you’ve got a good understanding of how social media affects branding, here are some social media branding strategies.

Social media branding strategies

1: Your strategy should align with your business goals

One of the greatest challenges you will encounter while you create a digital marketing strategy is coming up with a strategy that aligns with your business goals. What are your missions and goals, and how can you connect that with your branding strategy? SOSTAC model can help you here to analyze your business properly.

Don’t get lost tracking vanity metrics if it does not drive any business value. How does each trackable metrics affect your business goals? For starters, you’ve got to come up with performance metrics that align with your business goals?

For instance, you may want to drive 20% of your leads from Facebook, or probably increase your Twitter organic traffic by 15%. If you’ve not established a solid social media presence, you should get started by creating compelling profiles on any social media platform of your choice.

Speaking of platforms, you’ve got to focus on the right social media platform.

2: Focus on the right social media platform

As Google marketing strategy is important but right marketing platform is also important. Before taking a step forward, you need to find the right social media platform for your brand. This way, you get to reach a wide range of audiences. Picking a social media platform all boils down to understanding the dynamics of your audience.

For instance, if you manage a car mechanic business, choosing Pinterest will be a bad idea even with the massive 250 million average monthly users on the platform.

With the rise in the number of social media platforms, choosing the right platform may be quite challenging. To be effective in your choice of social media platform, you’ve got to focus on quality. User intent in digital marketing should not be ignored at all.

Yes, spreading yourself thin on several social media platforms will do you no good. Instead, you’ve got to focus on one platform and go all in.

With millions of businesses advertising on Facebook, the platform pretty much operates as a pay-to-click or pay-per-play service. Before doubling down on the platform, you’ve got to pay attention to your competitors that use Facebook. You should go for out of the box marketing ideas to build your brand.

Are they generating engagement and results? If yes, then you should probably consider using the platform.

Instagram is a visual-based platform. It’s an ideal fit for B2C businesses that has lots of compelling images to share with the public. B2B business owners may not gain many benefits from the platform.

B2B business owners who are looking for a social media platform should consider LinkedIn. Yes, LinkedIn is arguably the best social media platform for sharing thought leadership articles and industry-relevant content.

If you’ve got enough time, and you’re willing to put in the work, Twitter may be the right platform for you. Although it takes time to generate results from the platform, it’s worth the wait!

3: Develop a brand voice that stands out

A brand voice is critical when it comes to branding in the age of social media. Social media is crowded. To stand out, you’d need a strong brand voice. Your brand voice needs to be strong enough to connect with your audience.

Your brand voice should…

• Showcase your brand’s personality – it has to be unchanging and consistent
• Have a tone regularly adjusted to fit your message

When it comes to the tone of your message, you’ve got to be careful. Some customers are no fan of slang usage, and some customers do not tolerate mocking languages, especially when it’s coming from a brand. If you’re unsure of the right tone, you should opt for an authentic tone – a tone that’s value-driven.

As a general rule of thumb, you should be honest, friendly, and helpful. Anything else will not get you many results.

4: Create compelling visuals

Humans are visual creatures, and by creating compelling visuals, you’d pretty much draw much attention to your brand. Don’t get it twisted – text generate results, but if you want to drive better results, you’ve got to have a mix of text and images.

Speaking of images, you’ve got to put the quality and aesthetics of your images into consideration. Also, your graphics have to be in line with your overall branding. If you’ve not created assets like branding guide, font, colors, and logos, you’ve got to go get them.

You can use some celebrities if you afford to do that to build your brand reputation as influencer marketing increases ROI.

5: Take advantage of algorithms to drive more impressions

One of the challenges you’d encounter is keeping up with the ever-changing algorithms of social media platforms. For instance, Facebook does lots of major and minor algorithm updates. As a business owner, you’ve got to keep track of these algorithm updates to be ahead of your competition.

Most times, algorithm changes are designed to protect the audience and users, and also prevents the social platform from becoming ad-centric. You’ve got to be proactive, learn how these social platform algorithms work, and take advantage of them.

One more thing…

Follow industry experts to be up-to-date on the various trends and algorithm changes. And if you’ve got some resources to help you get through the various algorithm hurdles, then you’ve got to use it – there’s no crime in lessening your marketing burden.

6: Identify your target audience

Identifying your target audience is arguably the first step to building a brand on social media platforms. You’ve got to put some factors like gender, age, culture, geographic location, and socioeconomic status into consideration.

With these factors in place, you can easily influence the public perception of your business. For instance, if you manage a real estate agency, your target audience could be men and women above 40 years of age. Furthermore, they could be C-suite corporate executives who live around New York.

7: Always revise your brand

There is nothing wrong with growth. Most times, growth comes with changes – and you’ve got to adapt to those changes. To adapt to changes, you should always revise your brand. Brands always evolve as the company grows by using innovative ways to reach customers.

For instance, if you’ve branded your company as a travel agency that aids domestic and international vacations, you may likely expand your service offering to accommodate people who are looking to go for educational experiences abroad.

FAQs:

What is branding in the digital age?

Branding in the digital age (or digital branding) are brand communication strategies that are executed using digital marketing and the internet to promote a brand, establish its presence, and enhance the brand’s attributes.

Why is brand still so important in the age of electronic marketing?

If your brand comes secondary in your digital plan, then you’re playing a losing game. Branding in the age of social media ensures that your customers get everything (and anything) they want in real time — and at their fingertips.

How can social media be used to build a brand?

Branding in the age of social media is somewhat easy. And one of the primary benefits of using social media is a boost in brand awareness. By building a strong brand presence online, you get to reach more audience, and get more people aware of your product (or service) offering.

Why should brands use social media?

One of the key benefits of branding in the age of social media is that it helps brand owners to easily interact with their fans and customers. Also, customers and fans get to directly interact with the brand owners. Branding in the age of social media offers a two-way communication street — that’s much better than the one-way communication that’s being offered by traditional media.

Wrap Up:

Social media is here to stay. To build a brand on these social media platforms, you’ve got to identify your customer persona. Who do you want to attract, and what do you have to offer? After that, you’d need a brand voice.

Your brand voice has to be strong and consistent.

Next, you’ve got to choose the right social media platform for your brand. And when you’ve made your choice, you’d have to consciously study how things work on the platform.

Know how the algorithm on the platform works, and take advantage of it.

Yes, branding in the age of social media is hard work – but it’s worth every effort put into it.

Now you understand how to build your brand on social media, what system will you put in place to help you build a profitable brand on any social media platform?