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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

How to make your brand's social media as reliable and popular as grandma's cooking!
The growing digital world is a confusing place. Wouldn’t it be nice if social media was as reliable and trustworthy as the food grandma makes? It can be easy to overcomplicate things throughout life and business. When thinking about building good relationships, finding success in your career, or growing your brand, one value is more important than the rest: trust.

Trust is the most valued currency in the world. From personal relationships to complex business decisions to life-saving surgeries, trust is the foundation on which progress is made. Brands oftentimes get confused when trying to grow their social following. With the oversaturation of digital content and fast-changing platforms, it is easy to get lost when navigating the complexities of gaining influence on socials. Luckily, Marcus Sheridan, in his book They Ask You Answer, lays out a strategy to success in a simple manner that everyone can understand.

Marcus’s approach to creating content is so straightforward that you will be thinking to yourself, “Why haven't I thought of this before?” His content creation strategy revolves around answering the questions that customers ask on a daily basis. Your social media should be a place where customers can get their questions about your product or service answered. These questions that a brands content should be based around usually fall within “The Big 5.”
The Big 5 are the main topics that customers inquire about most often. Answering questions in these categories will engage and build trust with your customers. They are…

Cost and Pricing

Comparisons

Problems

Best of list

Reviews

Every industry can utilize the Big 5 to build trust with their customer by answering their most urgent questions. With that, you may be saying to yourself, “I know what to structure my content around now, but what is the best style of content to create?” In today's day and age, video dominates almost every social platform. Social media users expect to be entertained when they open their phones. It is your brand's job to entertain and inform the customer, and the easiest way to accomplish both those things is with video. Hubspot states that 86% of video marketers say video has been effective for generating leads, up another 2% from 2021 and up 5% since 2019. These are statistics that cannot be ignored.

Another critical aspect of creating content is shareability. Each platform has a unique algorithm that determines what content is placed in front of what people. In order to be ranked higher by the algorithm, your brand must demonstrate that people like your content and will stay on the platform longer because of it. The best way to demonstrate your popularity is by creating content that users will share with their friends and family. Almost all content can be curated to add an element of shareability.

Now, before you get excited and rush to tell your boss about this phenomenal approach to social media marketing, take a breath and read a little further. Without the proper brand kit, nothing you do on social media really matters. A brand kit lays out the voice, tone, colors, fonts, and logo usage for your brand. As I see it, the brand kit is the heart of a social media marketing strategy. Without it, your brand will become untrustworthy due to its sloppy and unorganized appearance. Every good social media strategy starts with a solid and well-developed brand kit.

In summary, growing a following on social media doesn’t have to be complex and confusing. With preparation, concentration, and consistency, a brand can build trust and gain popularity with its customers, just like grandma does with her food.
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5 Reasons META is a Must in Your Social Media Marketing!

Social media is leading the pack in today's digitally-driven world, and in marketing, it's one of the most critical platforms that connect businesses to their target audiences. With the robust targeting options and influence of social media, it's one of the easiest ways to introduce your brand to a wide range of customers.
With more than 1.5 billion users on social media to date, the networks each have their own individual characteristics and demographics that should be carefully taken into account. But despite the rising number of platforms, Facebook remains the heaviest-hitter of them all, and for a good reason: it continues to be the most effective platform at driving high return-on-investment and the highest click-through rates.
What Makes Facebook the King of Social Media Marketing?

Advertising on Facebook is More Affordable What Makes Facebook the King of Social Media Marketing?

Facebook's advertising platform offers a variety of monthly plans to fit just about any budget. Additionally, Facebook has options for a wide range of businesses, from small and local businesses to large and global businesses.
With a simple click of a button, you can start and manage your own Facebook advertising campaign and reach your target audience without having to break the bank.

Facebook Ads Reach A Diverse Set of Audiences

With 1.5 billion active users, Facebook is the largest platform in the world, and the number of businesses using the platform to market their products and services continues to grow. With such a sizeable number of users from all over the world and with such diverse lifestyles, it means that your ad can reach a wide range of users on this platform.
Additionally, Facebook offers a myriad of targeting methods, including location, interest, gender and age, to ensure that your message reaches the right audience.

Facebook Ads Have Flexible Targeting Options

Facebook's wide variety of targeting options can deliver your message to the right audience no matter their location, interests, gender or age.

For instance, if you're a local business, you can target customers within a certain radius of your business. Or perhaps you want to target customers interested in your product or service, such as pizza shops in the area interested in cooking classes.

With Facebook's targeting options, you can easily reach the most relevant audience and effectively prompt them to take your desired action.

Facebook Ads are Effective and Easy to Set Up

The platform's built-in tools make it easy to create and run your own ad campaign. With Facebook's built-in reporting tools, you have easy access to statistics and information on who viewed your ad and how many clicks you received.
Additionally, you have the option to use third-party tools to help manage your ad campaign. These tools allow you to track your ad's performance and optimize its setup so you can get the most out of your campaign.

Facebook Ads Comes with Simple-to-Use Yet Results-Driven Analytics

The platform's built-in analytics tools allow you to easily track your campaign's performance and the results you're getting. Through the use of Facebook's powerful analytics dashboard, you can keep an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) that let you know how effective your ad is.

You can also use Facebook's ads manager to monitor your ad's performance. You can set budgets, set up automatic bidding and ad delivery, and track your performance with real-time reports through this platform.

The Bottom Line: Why Facebook Continues to Hold the Spotlight in Social Media Marketing

If you're looking to get ahead in the world of digital marketing, then you should definitely consider taking advantage of Facebook's powerful advertising platform. With the most affordable pricing, a host of diverse targeting options, and built-in reporting tools, it remains one of the most effective and efficient forms of social media marketing on the market.

Are You Looking for a Digital Marketing Agency in Langley?

Interested in learning more about the best ways to effectively use Facebook advertising for your business? Contact us today, and we'll help you see your business succeed! We provide Facebook marketing and SEO services, so let us help you grow your social presence in more ways than one.

10 ways to build your brand on social media : https://cutt.ly/OAvipFO