How to Create and Maintain a Social Media Branding Strategy

Social media is an ideal channel for your brand to develop great communication and establish a relationship with them on those platforms. However, there's more to social media than simply helping your brand interact with its audience. Social media platforms are an excellent marketing tool that can push any brand forward.

Various marketing strategies allow you to achieve multiple goals on social media, ranging from gaining recognition to boosting sales or conversions.

Still, the social media landscape isn't easy to navigate, especially for brands. That's why it's critical to have a strong branding strategy to help you out.

With that in mind, here are a few ways to create and maintain a social media branding strategy.

1. Market research

Before you delve any deeper into the world of social media or branding, for that matter, it's of vital importance to conduct as much market research as you can.

You have to obtain as much information as you can about your target audience. Information is key to developing a branding strategy for social media and otherwise.

Without information and data to drive your decisions, you're more likely to make a mistake, and mistakes made by brands aren't so easy to fix.

Here are some of the things market research can help you with:

• Identifying your target audience
• Determining your audience's preferences, needs, demands and expectations
• Creating consumer personas
• Determining your audience's demographics
• Identifying key social media channels to establish a presence
• Help you establish your brand identity and persona
• Help you communicate your brand values to your audience

2. Conduct a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis is simply a must if you want to create an effective social media branding strategy. The main reason is that you must know what your competitors are doing on social media to assess their strengths and weaknesses.

Only then will you be able to find a way to outrun them and gain a competitive advantage.

A competitive analysis can help you learn how to navigate the social media environment more efficiently.

It's important to remember that the goal of this analysis isn’t to help you copy what your competitors are doing but instead to create your unique approach that will outperform theirs in the long run.

For example, you should monitor how your competitors communicate with their audience on social media, what type of content they’re sharing, how engaged their audience is and so on. That way, you can find the right gaps you can exploit to do something better than what your competitors are doing.

3. Develop your brand

Before you enter the social media landscape, you need to have a well-developed brand. What that means is that your brand needs to be strong in every aspect so that you can make a great first impression.

If your brand is incomplete, your audience won't take you seriously, and you’ll lose potential customers everywhere you go.

If you don't know how to develop your brand, you can always consult with a website design company that can help you out.

That said, here are a few things you should focus on to develop your brand the right way:

• Create clear brand core values, mission statement and brand promise
• Tell your story to the fullest
• Create a strong brand identity
• Have a well-developed website
• Create a brand persona to humanize your brand
• Use the right tone of voice for communication with your audience
• Use the right visuals, such as colors, logo and typography to represent your brand

4. Choose the right social media channels

As mentioned before, market research can help you determine the right social media channels to establish a presence. But what does that mean exactly? More often than not, many brands make the mistake of trying to establish their presence on every social media network.

There are many social media networks, and building a presence on each of them is a monumental undertaking even for brands with a lot of capital.

This endeavor is a waste of both time and money because your audience isn't present on every social media platform, and if they are, their numbers aren't significant enough for your brand to be there.

What you should do instead is identify social media networks your audience is most present on.

For example, if your audience is largely present on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, these should be your primary targets. Always start with one social network and slowly expand to others.

Keep in mind that even though you're targeting the same audience on every social media network, the approach you use must be different. This is what your audience expects and it's something brands must do to have a strong presence on multiple networks.

5. Kick-off your marketing campaign

Once you've determined the key social media channels you want to build a presence on, it's time to start building exposure for your brand. The best way to do so is to develop a social media marketing campaign.

The purpose of the campaign may differ. In this case, you want to promote your brand and engage with your audience, so it's important to reach out to them the right way.

As mentioned before, each social media network you're building a presence on requires a different approach even though it's the same audience you're engaging with.

For example, if you have to repurpose connect for each network, use a slightly different tone of voice and different messaging methods.

What's important is to create a branding strategy that will help you achieve your goals.

If your goal is to build a strong presence and create awareness for your brand, here are a few things you should consider:

• Create and regularly publish high-quality and highly relevant content
• Communicate with your audience as frequently as possible
• Organize contests, giveaways and polls
• Encourage engagement through incentives and gifts
• Nurture your relationship with your audience
• Respond to feedback in person

6. Engage in content marketing

Content is the key to having a successful social media branding strategy.

The main reason is that content provides your audience with true value. To leverage that, your content must be highly informative, educational and entertaining aside from being relevant.

Keep in mind that social media users prefer original content, so make sure you provide them with such.

However, producing original content isn’t always easy. If you have trouble coming up with original ideas, you can always repurpose old content and give it a new form.

For instance, turn your old articles into videos, webinars and podcasts.

Many consumers these days don't like to read web content, so they might've missed out on your old content. If you allow them to listen or watch it, they'll be eager to engage.

Moreover, enrich your content with visuals to boost views and engagement. As a matter of fact, your content can generate up to 94% more views if it contains graphics and other visual elements.

If you add more compelling visuals to your content, you can gain a 34% increase in audience engagement, such as shares, likes and comments.

7. Monitor your strategy

Monitoring your social media branding strategy can be quite challenging, especially once everything is in motion.

You'll undoubtedly make mistakes at first, but that's okay as long as you fix those mistakes as soon as possible.

However, you won't know if you made a mistake in the first place if you're not keeping an eye on your indicators.

Testing different tactics and strategies is an integral part of maintaining your branding strategy.

For example, you should always monitor various metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). That said, a lot of brands monitor social listening metrics.

This metric allows you to track every conversation on social media that includes your brand being mentioned.

Moreover, you can also track the sentiment in which your brand is being mentioned. This will help you understand how your audience perceives your brand and if there's something you should improve to change their perception.

Creating and maintaining a social media branding strategy demands a lot of work, effort and dedication. There's little room for error, which is why you must make more informed and strategic decisions.

Once you've established your presence on social media, you must constantly work to maintain it so that your brand can grow and develop further.