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Despite the proliferation of social media platforms, coming up with an authentic social media brand is easier than you might think. In fact, many small businesses now make coming up with a social media brand a key part of their overall marketing strategy. Here’s a quick look at 5 key steps that should become the cornerstone of any social media branding strategy.
Step #1: Develop your brand identity
Since there are so many different social platforms out there, it helps if you can be as consistent as possible across all of them. In other words, your Twitter handle should match your Instagram handle. Your social media avatar image should be identical – or at least, look very similar – across every major platform. And your use of descriptions, fonts and colors should also be identical. Also, your “brand voice” should be the same across all platforms.
Step #2: Automate as much as possible
There are a lot of powerful social media automation tools out there that will help you save time and energy. Many of them allow you to schedule content in advance, and also to track mentions of your brand. While you don’t want to over-automate or over-schedule, using some automation tools can help to bring some order and consistency to your brand identity.
Step #3: Decide which content to share on which platform
Not all social media platforms are created the same. Thus, you don’t want to be simply re-posting the same content on Facebook as you’ve already posted on Twitter. The best brands are able to carve out a different reason to follow them on each new platform. For example, Twitter might be great for blasting out news, promotions and brief updates about your company. But you’d want to save your best visual content for Instagram.
Step #4: Create a content schedule and stick to it
Many people come up with grandiose plans to become a social media influencer, post a few times, and then let everything fizzle out once the initial excitement wears off. That’s why it’s helpful to create a content calendar. Try to commit to a schedule of several social media posts per day, such as 2-3 tweets per day and 1-2 Facebook posts every 24 hours. During the week, you can augment that content with a few photos from Instagram.
Step #5:Track your metrics
Yes, metrics and data need to be part of your approach. You need to know who is following you, what they are engaging with, and how often they are responding to or commenting on your content. This will help you to fine-tune your content strategy and build a much more accurate picture of your target audience.
Final Thought
Social media can be a great way to build and grow your brand. Choose a few platforms that you enjoy using, find tools that can help you automate some of your posting and content creation, and use data that you collect to improve your performance over time. Those steps will lead to the creation of a strong, authentic brand identity.
