Make the most of social branding for your business. Enhance and strengthen the brand identity and strengthen the business.
Intercepting a growing audience, interacting with people and affiliating with your customers is possible. Such as? Use social media strategically to create engagement.
Among the most effective marketing tools, social networks allow you to increase the brand awareness of your company, strengthen your image compared to the competition and give you important advantages in terms of sales.
A social branding designed specifically for your company allows you, in fact, not only to make an excellent lead generation but to create a community ready to choose your products and services.
Table of Contents
What Does It Mean To Do Social Branding?
Social branding means communicating a brand and its value through social networks, with the ultimate goal of gathering support and transforming visitors into customers.
4 elements characterize social branding:
- Identity: You need to know your company perfectly. The obligatory step here is the definition of your brand identity. In general, you can’t do without it.
- Public: You also need to know your target audience perfectly. In this way, you will be able to give the right answers to every need and avoid making attempts that can make you waste time and turn out to be unsuccessful.
- Contents: Take into account what you have defined about your audience and decide what to propose and share.
- Graphics: Social media live above all on images; it is impossible to overlook the visual aspect. Maintain a consistent line with your brand identity without forgetting what captures your audience’s attention.
What Mistakes To Avoid In Social Branding?
To create a strategy that makes social media talk about your brand and makes it speak well – in this context, the phrase “Talking well or badly doesn’t matter, as long as you talk about it” is really to be avoided – be careful not to run into any slips.
Some mistakes could seriously undermine your brand reputation and affect your entire business. Let’s look together at what it is.
Do Not Define The Role Of Social Media In The Communication Plan
Okay, you want to use social media for your business, but how do you think they can help you achieve your goals?
Ask yourself this question. Before taking action, it must be absolutely clear to you what role social media plays in your communication and marketing plan.
The risk is not to exploit the opportunities given by each platform, wasting time and energy, or worse, to use them badly, sabotaging projects and results.
Choosing The Wrong Social Network
Here is one of the choices that seem more trivial and are very insidious. Yes, because the choice of platform affects your ability to pursue your social branding and business goals. In addition to your image.
Offering content in line with your brand but out of context with the platform, for example, can produce a negative reaction from the public.
Or find yourself on the most popular social network of the moment without your audience there, which can make you waste time and money.
In short, test different types of social networks, evaluate the most suitable based on your content and your audience’s response, find out what competitors do and what responses they get and then choose.
Don’t Take Care Of The Profile
Here the errors can be different:
- Imaginative and excessive solutions for name and profile image are to be forgotten. Quite simply, keep the company name and logo. Don’t risk being recognized by your audience or communicating something other than who you are.
- Do not give information. From Instagram to YouTube, all social networks provide a space where you can talk about yourself. True, you often have very few characters available, but why not use them? They are a good opportunity to reiterate – or tell people who you are and what you do for the first time. The absence of this element could also be perceived as an indication of a lack of care and professionalism.
- Remember that you are building a company profile, so give your brand a clear and professional idea. Avoid anything that refers to personal aspects.
Use A Tone Of Voice That Is Not Yours
We said that social branding is inevitably based on brand identity a little while ago. Therefore, follow all its aspects, tone of voice included.
Even social networks must be managed by keeping faith with the ToV that most represents you and allows you to get your message across to your customers.
Not being consistent with your brand’s tone of voice could confuse your audience and confuse you with your competition.
They Have Poorly Organized And Inconsistent Content
Deciding what to publish is a rather delicate step. Always ask yourself: what are you using social media for? What do you want to get from the audience?
These questions will help you define a strategy for your content.
Again, falling into a mistake is easier than it seems. You could choose the wrong content or opt for a type of content with little appeal.
Experiment with graphics, videos and themes and monitor views and interactions so you can understand what your audience prefers.
Once you have identified the public’s preferences, we suggest creating a format to be proposed again to distinguish yourself and generate affiliation. Finally, in this case, do not neglect the coherence between images, texts, and brand identity.
Combining these aspects will lead users of the social network, used to identify styles and visual elements, to associate the content in question with your brand immediately.
Leave The Profiles
Once the profiles are open, graphics and content are defined and do not leave the pages.
What does it mean? That’s the time to start leveraging platforms. An often common mistake is to think that just being present and the rest comes by itself.
Mistaken. All profiles must be updated regularly and kept active. That is why it is necessary to organize to keep publications regular.
The editorial calendar can help you keep your social media actions consistent. Organize it without limiting yourself to promotional content only.
Also, think about informative and educational content. Otherwise, you can be seen as a brand that creates spam—nothing worse for the company’s reputation.
Forget The Public
Social branding presupposes interaction with users on the platforms. So be careful about giving answers and engaging with audiences interested in your brand and your posts.
Being absent could make you seem unreliable and professional. On the contrary, giving your feedback shows a present brand, attentive and interested in the public.
Another aspect we want to focus on, even if it is not a real mistake, is the possibility of really involving users.
You can invite people to take action, create contests, take them behind the scenes of your company or dedicate small promotions related to their activities on your social pages.
In short, the possibilities are so many. Not taking advantage of it to strengthen your brand would be a real shame.
Avoid Difficult Conversations
We know you certainly don’t want to bring your company on social media to find yourself faced with controversy and bad situations. Yet we cannot rule out this possibility.
A customer could complain or dispute some aspect of your product or service. What to do? The wrong move is to avoid confrontation.
The risk is that things get out of your control and cause damage. Better, then, to experience these situations as an opportunity to improve.
If there was a mistake, taking responsibility, letting people know that you are working to solve it, and apologizing will positively affect the brand image.
The answer will have to be appropriate to the context and the problem.
The tendency, in these cases, is to react. And this could turn out to be a fatal mistake. Instead, focus on facing the moment by giving answers.
The difference between the two approaches is that a reaction tends to be instinctive, regardless of the long-term effects. On the other hand, a response is the result of reflection and avoids conflict.
After all, an essential aspect of who likes a brand that argues with its customers?
Social media are the added value to your communication. Use social branding, be careful not to fall into these aspects and with a little patience, you can have excellent results.
Remember that even the public on social networks needs to be cared for and nurtured daily.
