10 Ways To Build Your Brand On Social Media
There are many benefits of using social media to grow a business and to craft an online persona that showcases a brand’s values and services. A defined social media strategy can help businesses be more profitable, establish credibility, and gain a strategic edge over the competition. Social media has become a powerful tool in marketing as it’s accessible anytime, anywhere, and is a fun, engaging way to share and collect information.
According to the most recent data from Statista, as of 2021, 82% of the U.S. population has a profile on social media, with the most popular platform being Facebook. In 2021, nearly 92% of U.S. marketers were expected to use social media for marketing purposes.
Planoly consulted research from social media influencers, brand managers, and marketing agencies to compile 10 of the best ways to start building your brand on social media.
There are various strategies for companies and brands to up their social media marketing game. It can be something as simple as taking more time getting to know your audience and creating content accordingly or following and engaging with accounts that may be similar and relevant to your brand. It also helps to include relevant hashtags—though you don’t go overboard with them in posts. Be sure to include hashtags that will be of interest to your target audience.
A copy-and-paste approach may seem ideal when posting content across various social platforms, but sometimes it helps to take the time to curate and differentiate content for each respective platform. What draws attention on Facebook may fall into the ether on Twitter and vice versa. Giving your social accounts a more authentic feel may require a more unique posting method based on your target audience.
Continue reading for 10 strategies you can use to build your brand on social media.
Determine your specialty
Influencers on social media tend to specialize in a certain area—whether it’s the beauty, parenting, or financial coaching spaces, specificity is key. Finding a niche can sometimes be challenging for one with myriad interests, but it helps for an influencer to hone in on a specific audience and establish authority. Your niche is what you’re genuinely interested in and what suits your personality.
After deciding what you want to focus on, begin creating your posts around that topic. It helps to tag other accounts closely related to your topic of interest.
Know your audience and demographic
What does your business know about its customers? What are their age groups? Where are they located? These are questions that companies need to ask in order to learn about their customers.
In terms of selecting influencers to represent their brand, companies will want to partner with influencers followed by the same group of people who purchase its products and services. Influencers who are authentic, engaging, and who have an understanding of the brand will be key to the success of the company’s social media campaigns.
Target the right social media platforms for your brand
It’s important for a business to know the demographics of its target market when deciding which social media channels to use. Brands that are more visual may lean toward Instagram and TikTok, while brands focused on real-time events may find Twitter to be more suitable.
It’s beneficial to define social media goals and to figure out the social media channels the company’s audience uses in order to develop a receptive audience. Take time to analyze the type of content the business is posting on its channels and how the content works for each social media platform.
As of 2021, for business-to-business companies, Facebook and LinkedIn tend to be the preferred social media platforms. For business-to-consumer companies, Facebook and Instagram were the most popular platforms.
Define your brand’s voice and tone
A brand’s target audience is the most crucial aspect of developing a voice and tone. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and consider what would inspire them to take action to buy your company’s product or follow your brand.
Often, companies take more of a general approach, directing social media posts to a broad audience, but catering to more niche users may work better. Brands need to think of what it is they wish to accomplish—when the dust settles, what is the primary purpose?—and how the answer to that question can resonate long-term with its audience.
Connect with influencers in your industry
Networking on social media has been a way for many companies to get their name out there and build brand recognition. It’s no different when influencers decide to join forces, even if just for one specific event. It can be highly beneficial to collaborate with fellow industry influencers, whether it’s launching a cross-promotional giveaway experience or appearing on another influencer’s podcast.
Whether you’re looking to expose your business to a bigger audience, generate leads, or boost traffic to your blog, partnering with fellow influencers with a similar target audience can be impactful. Collaboration can diversify an influencer or company’s possibilities, build connections, and create more opportunities overall.
Identify which products or services you want to promote
For the most part, influencers work independently and generate their own content while integrating a brand’s marketability. For relevant influencers, creating content takes time; therefore, a brand must recognize and value the work required in growing that influencer’s following and establishing their voice.
When it comes to promoting products and services, in-demand influencers tend to lean toward companies that offer paid partnerships in addition to complimentary products. This is not to say that influencers will only work with a company that gives away free products, but the pull of a partnership arrangement is certainly a more attractive, mutually beneficial arrangement.
Pay attention to trends in social media and video content
Companies should focus on trends to better hone their marketing efforts. Some trends include the rise of short video content shared on platforms, such as TikTok, or via Instagram Stories and Youtube Shorts, all of which have resonated with marketers and brands, notably throughout the pandemic.
The e-commerce option for social media platforms has also taken off as brands can connect their online store with their brand’s social media account, removing the need for a third-party website. Paid advertising on social media also gives brands the opportunity to showcase content in front of a target audience.
Be consistent with your social media posts
It can be challenging to post consistently on social media, especially when managing several social platforms or multiple accounts across platforms. But consistency is key when it comes to audience recognition and follower growth and retention.
Posting strategically and consistently maximizes your organic reach, which is the number of people you reach without paying for an ad or boosting a post. Scheduling your content ahead of time with news or upcoming events can make it feel more timely. Planning in advance also allows you to keep a steady stream of posts in front of your audience at times when you may not be online.
Engage with your consumers and followers
Engagement develops customer relationships, builds trust, and helps businesses reach a larger audience. It’s also a quick way for companies and influencers to receive feedback on what’s resonating with their target audience. Some ways that companies and influencers engage on social media is through responding to comments, sharing content, responding to direct messages, and creating polls to generate responses on insights for particular topics.
In most cases, engagement is often more important in terms of impact than the number of followers, as a business can have 20,000 followers on social media with zero engagement. This results in a low return on investment. But if there are, say, 5,000 followers with much higher engagement, a higher ROI makes the business appear more credible and not like there’s a bunch of ghost followers.
Define your metrics of success and use them to inspire future content
In recent years, social media has served as a major tool for businesses and influencers to have a better understanding of their audience. There are ways to analyze social media data through built-in insights and analytics that are provided by most social platforms. These findings show information such as demographics, impressions, and reach, all of which are essential metrics for building an audience.
Analytics and metrics help to track progress, such as the speed at which you’re building an audience and which posts are performing better than others. The posts that do well can be an example of what may work for similar future posts.
Social media engagement can be a war of attrition, so weeding out content that is not engaging your target audience will result in a stronger overall profile and present an image of brand authority.
This story originally appeared on PLANOLYand was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
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How my company used social media to increase traffic and revenue — for free
You know who loves to give advice? Everyone. Especially when it comes to marketing. But what do you do when that advice requires a budget—a budget you don’t have? What happens then?
I’m the founder of a small sustainable, socially responsible, and zero-waste fashion label that works with a community of women single parents in North Macedonia. Operating from a country with such limited resources can be, to put it mildly, challenging. I founded the company back in 2013. It started as a marketplace for local designers, which quickly expanded to cover international designers from all over the world.
Four years into it, we pivoted to become a standalone fashion label. The shift was driven by my desire to make a change in the society I lived in. At the time, I was working with a woman-run studio, and the seamstress became a single parent. I was not only impressed by her strength but also inspired by her tenacity and an iron will to provide her child with better circumstances than she was born in.
That’s when I made the decision to make Bastet Noir, a socially responsible brand. And as the business grew, so did our community of women single parents. Today, we’re proud to say that we work with five woman-owned studios, operated by either women single parents or women micro-entrepreneurs.
What used to be a small, local business has grown into—granted, still small—a global brand with customers from all over the world.
We used every tool in our toolbox to make it happen with virtually no budget—just a pipe dream and persistence and will to make it real. Here, I want to talk about what we did on social media to make it happen.
The power of social media for a local business
Even if you don’t choose to invest in social media, you should still have an up-to-date presence. One way to do this is by automating your brand’s social media, doing things like automatically sharing all new blog posts with your followers.
As a bootstrapped company operating from a country with limited resources, our marketing budget was—and still is—practically non-existent. Everything we make is reinvested back into our community of women single parents, so throughout the years, we had to think of creative ways to attract customers. Social media was one of the most successful.
Succeeding on Instagram without a budget
Ok, let’s rewind for a second. When we started out back in 2013, Instagram still wasn’t a thing. That’s why it took us a while to get to our desired target market in the United States. When we finally got on the platform two years later, it took us almost a year to decode it and figure out a way to grow and attract the right followers.
Since we weren’t located in the U.S., our first few hundred followers were based in Macedonia. The only way to target the U.S. was to pay for ads—which we, of course, didn’t have the money for. So how did we make it work? Through a lot of trial and error, yes, but most importantly, by establishing a captivating and powerful story behind the brand.
All of our posts and stories aligned with the narrative we were trying to tell. The gist: we were a sustainable, zero-waste, and socially responsible label that worked with women single parents in North Macedonia, and we helped these women earn much more than the industry average monthly income of $300. In addition to the storyline, the feed needed to have an aesthetic that would be recognizable for our brand, so we chose several color tones that best represented our label.
We planned our content a month out, which gave us time to hone the copy and research hashtags (we found that sustainability- and small business-related hashtags were our first priority). For all of this, we used the social media planning tool Later, which helped us a lot, especially with the visual part of how the feed would look.
Next, we attempted to bridge the gap between our social media strategy and our content strategy. We began by using People Map to create a list of the women we wanted to cover on our blog. The app helped us target editors, writers, social media managers for fashion magazines, and women entrepreneurs, all located in the U.S. Once we found their profiles, we found their emails—either from their Instagram profiles or using Rocket Reach.
Note: Be sure to follow all applicable rules around cold emailing prospects and give people ways to opt out of continued communication.
We composed an email to each woman, explaining our business and personalizing it to each recipient to demonstrate our interest (for example, we mentioned what had impressed us about them). Most of them didn’t respond back, but the ones that did were more than happy to extend their selfless help: we got a number of women to do interviews with us for our blog series, Cool Faces of Bastet Noir.
Since all of these women worked for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Business, and Elle, this enabled us to gain credibility. And since most of them shared the stories on their social media accounts (including Instagram), we started getting engagement from their followers. We even got traction on our website, since they were sharing the links on their feeds and stories.
Since advertising wasn’t an option due to lack of funds, this was the only way for us to utilize the power of influencers. Our entire investment was the production of the piece and the shipping cost to send them the outfit—and all we asked for in return was a few photos of them wearing the pieces, so we could include them in our blog posts.
You can start small even on social. To help, here are three workflows that can help you automate your Instagram for Business account so you can focus on the more personal parts of marketing.
Using Reddit for marketing
Reddit is a bit tricky because many of the communities prohibit advertising and, of course, anything they consider spammy, like sharing discount codes, links to your own website, and even introducing your brand. That means you need to engage with the community on another level. Start a conversation, answer questions, and show that you’re an authority on the topic. Then, if they’re interested in learning more about your brand, you can share links. If you do it before someone asks, you risk being banned from one of the most engaged internet communities.
We joined a few subreddits, including r/findashion, r/ethicalfashion, and r/Etsy, but r/FemaleFashionAdvice was the most important one for us. This community has 1.7 million members that we knew would be interested in our brand. We started talking with people on various threads, mostly giving them styling advice. This gradually evolved into me posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir of course. People started asking where I got some of the items, so I shared links to the website. And that did the trick: we saw a tremendous increase in traffic, and orders started rolling in.
How to use YouTube for free marketing
We only started working with YouTubers at the beginning of 2020. I guess you could say we arrived a bit late to the party, but in our defense, we truly believed that we weren’t able to afford their rates—which was true to a point. A YouTuber who has more than 10,000 views on a video charges at least $3,000 for a 30-60-second brand mention. And that’s just for a mention, not a dedicated brand video. For a brand like ours, it’s way too expensive.
Instead, we decided to see if anyone would like our clothes enough to promote them for free. First, we prepared a list of hundreds of YouTubers whose styles we believed matched our brand aesthetic. We found them by searching on YouTube for keywords like “minimal style,” “ethical fashion,” and “environmentally friendly fashion”—and several variations. Most of them didn’t even respond back, which makes sense. But the ones that did were so taken by our cause that they selflessly offered to cover our brand.
Here’s an example from Chloe Kian and one from Cat Creature. These reviews and their support helped us bring in more traffic to our website and create brand awareness—and as a result, we saw increased revenue.
Using Pinterest for eCommerce marketing
Pinterest is the best social media platform for discovering new things to buy. Since the platform itself is highly visual, people usually go there to organize their shopping lists—that makes it great for any eCommerce brand. And if your store is on Shopify, you can use the Pinterest app to get what they call rich pins, which means that the description and price on Pinterest will be pulled directly from your website.
The best way to increase followers and get repins is to use shared boards, community boards made usually by Pinfluencers (yes, that’s a thing). And how do you find these boards? You can do a little Google search, or you can use PinGroupie like we did. PinGroupie lets you find and filter boards according to categories, number of followers, and other criteria.
If you decide to lean into Pinterest for your marketing, here are 5 tips for using Pinterest for business.
We’re currently members of about eight boards. The most important one for us is called Fashion + Friends, and it has more than 600k followers. The beauty of these boards is that, once you’ve been approved by the admin, the things you post appear on the feed of every follower in that board. That means millions of potential customers around the world—without investing a single dime. These boards sent traffic directly to our site and also helped us rank higher on Google.
One tip: go for boards with more than 10k followers. Boards with fewer followers probably won’t do you any favors—they’ll just sit on your profile and collect dust.
And there you have it: that’s how we used our no-budget social media strategy to increase traffic and get sales.
This article by Daniela Milosheska was first published on the Zapier blog. Find the original post here.
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Improve The Customer Experience With Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the most popular method for branding websites through social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. Social media is an excellent way to grow your online brands and offer extensive marketing content on your website.
How Social Media Engagement Increases Conversions
While social media marketing is important, it is often overlooked in the business industry. Businesses experiment with this tool and see how much it has helped them. From improving engagement rates to increasing awareness, businesses can grow in a variety of ways. They can create awareness for their brand and drive sales by spending time engaging with the social networking community.
Can A Brand Generate More Leads Using Social Media?
The customer journey is no longer linear. Consumers want to search for brands before ever speaking to them, and information shared via social media helps customers find those businesses. With social media, secrets are no longer secrets.
Tips To Generating Leads On Facebook
When looking for potential customers, you should always include a social media website or two. This allows the customer to make contact with your brand with the abilities described above. This technique is best used when the door to finding new customers has already been closed. The layout of your blog post should emphasize these factors that would be beneficial to be present on your social media websites. The leads could also originate from different forms of advertising like radio and TV spots.
Social Media Marketing Examples
Social media marketing is the use of social media tools to achieve objectives political philosophy, attract customers and sell products. For small business owners and larger businesses, social media marketing not only increases website traffic but translates into increased brand loyalty as well. It helps set a personal touch with every customer that gives them insight into an organization via social interactions with professionals.
What Small Businesses Can Learn From Big Brands
Businesses should focus on the customer experience over social media marketing because it's a cost-effective way to give your customers what they want. It is understood that social media marketing may not be practical for every company right now, but prioritizing customer service will eventually save you more time and money in the long run.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is one of the new buzzes, and it can help improve customer experience by connecting and interacting with your customers in a time-honored way through social networks. However, without proper planning and dedicated time, you can easily stumble into doing a bad job at social media marketing.
Best Social Media Growing Tool: https://bit.ly/35F6ksD [Copy & Paste URL to the Browser]