Why Is Brand-Building Important For Social Media?

Building a brand identity is an essential part of any business’ digital marketing and social media presence. Any social media marketing agency will tell you that having a strong identity is the key to engaging with your audience online. Regardless of the main objectives of your social media strategy, having strong branding is crucial to how well your audience perceives you.

Creating a strong identity allows customers to better relate to and understand you. Having relatable messaging, in turn, fosters trust. And when people trust your business, it’s much easier to turn them into your customers.

3 Elements Of Brand-Building Through Social Media

When you hire a full-service digital agency, its social media marketing services typically include the curation of your online identity. But what steps do they typically take to make sure the way your business is presented online is on point? Let’s review the elements of brand-building below.

Establish Your Tone Of Voice

It is common practice for social media marketing companies to craft a guide to the voice of a brand. An important factor when it comes to brand-building through social media marketing is consistency. If your tone of voice does not work well with your core values or changes every time you communicate, it can harm how audiences perceive you.

There are three factors to consider when crafting your tone of voice. Let’s go over each of them:

• Tone: What themes or feelings do you want to express? Are you formal and authoritative or fun and silly?
• Language: What sort of vocabulary do you want to use? Does your audience respond to corporate lexicon or internet slang?
• Purpose: What do you hope to achieve through the communications in your content? Do you want to educate or entertain?

Do bear in mind that the examples provided above are not the only questions you should ask yourself for each factor.

Let’s put this social media advertising tool into context. Let’s say you run a social media management agency in Sydney. People will make judgments of your business based on how you present it – if you claim to be an expert on social media management but don’t talk like one, people are less likely to trust you.

The psychological concept of “social proof” is very useful here – you need to prove, with your messaging, that you are just what your target market needs. Here’s what your tone of voice might look like:

• Tone: Knowledgeable, confident, approachable
• Language: Simple, casual, insightful
• Purpose: Inform, educate, sell

These are qualities that your audience would want to see in someone who they’d hire as a social media manager in Sydney.

Create A Style Guide For Your Content

If you or your digital agency wants to make the most out of your social media content, you need to create a style guide. This tool is comparable to style guides that publications use to ensure their articles are written up to a certain standard. However, the difference with social media style guides is that it applies beyond the written word.

A social media marketing style guide encompasses the standards you set across all aspects of your content and the way you engage your audience. Typically, a creative agency will organise a style guide according to the following categories:

Copywriting

When crafting a copywriting style guide for social media marketing, it’s important to already have your brand voice in order. This will keep your content creation much more consistent and make your digital marketing initiatives much more streamlined.

That said, there are also other elements that come into play when preparing the writing for your content:

• Copy structure
• Terminologies and conventions
• Hashtag usage

Visual Identity

Crafting an effective visual identity goes well beyond just your logo – there are other assets you need to think about when it comes to social media marketing. Nailing a consistent aesthetic down is crucial to your content creation process. Without a guide, you’re more prone to publishing content that could harm the image of your business.

In social media marketing, visual identity includes:

• Logo usage
• Colour palette
• Font hierarchy
• Photography themes
• Post formats and sizing

Community Management

Social media is a digital marketing platform where businesses and customers can directly engage with each other. However, this dynamic is a double-edged sword.

On one hand, social media provides plenty of opportunities for your business to gain positive traction. On the other hand, it can also leave you vulnerable to negative attention, especially if you don’t have any protocols in place to handle it.

Below are some examples of escalation protocols you should include in your social media marketing style guide:

• How to respond to comments
• How to respond to other brands and competitors
• How to respond to private message enquiries
• How to respond to business or product criticism
• How to manage crises

Final Thoughts

Carefully curating your brand identity on social media is crucial to your success in the online space. As more businesses and social media marketers become more aggressive online, the more difficult it is to stand out. But as long as you develop a social media marketing strategy and a strong branding framework on which your business can deftly stand, you’ll be better equipped to fight for your customers’ attention.