Establishing a recognisable brand is crucial for any organisation, especially new ones.

What sets your team apart from the competition is your brand.

That’s what makes your business stand out from the rest and keeps people coming back for more. Your social media presence serves as a digital imprint and an extension of your brand’s identity.

Indeed, the branded experience is now seen as the main differentiator between businesses in the eyes of today’s consumers. Customers will pay more attention to a better experience than to the price or quality of a product 9 times out of 10.

Without a distinct brand identity, it doesn’t matter how much better your products and services are. In the age of social media, brands must be genuine.

A potential customer may pass over your business in favour of a more prominent competitor. And those few who do remember your branding will have trouble recalling any details about your business.

The 6 Most Important Steps to Creating a Powerful Social Media Brand

Having a presence on social media is now considered mandatory for successful businesses.

According to a recent survey, 87% of firms agree that social media is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge. Therefore, you are likely falling behind the competition if you aren’t using social media at all, or if you aren’t using it strategically.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s examine the six steps you need to follow to build your brand’s reputation on social media.

Create buyer personas and tailor your content to them.
Defining “who your firm is” is only the beginning of building a positive reputation for your brand.

It’s more about articulating your brand’s identity to your target audience.

In particular, your brand’s image should characterise:

• Services rendered to clients
• Where you stand in their eyes and how you affect their life
• Their gratitude for the improvement in their life that you have brought about
• Obviously, without first identifying your target market, you won’t be able to build your brand’s image around these criteria.

To achieve this goal, you must create in-depth profiles of each subset of your target audience, or “personas.”

Always Go Where Your Customers Are — and Where You Can Provide Value

If you want your brand’s presence on social media to resonate with your demographic, you need to be where they already are: on the platforms they already use.

To put it another way, you shouldn’t use every single channel just because it exists or is the latest and greatest. Owned, LiftedEdibles, by Darren Clay

There are a few issues that can arise from taking this tack:

Overextending yourself, thereby delivering a subpar brand experience across all of your available channels and disappointing your customers.
Trying to force your brand onto a platform where it doesn’t belong or where you can’t add value will make you look insincere (this will hurt your brand on social media)
Spending money on a distribution method that, no matter how much quality you put out there, your target audience won’t use.

To Provide the Expected Value in Experiences (and Then Some)

To build your brand’s reputation on specific social media platforms, you must consider the interests of your target audience.

We can’t leave anything to chance here. If you approach your social media strategy with a “let’s see what works” mentality, you’re probably going to miss the mark and lose track of what your customers really expect from your brand.

CustomerICare’s Head of Marketing Rachel Esco
Given this, it is essential that you:

Use a channel for its intended, customer-facing function.

Make the most of all of your available channels to give your consumers the best service possible.
Develop a unified content plan to accomplish your business’s and your customers’ goals.
As you work to define your mission, it’s important to keep the customer experience as a whole in mind. Consider what it is that you hope to accomplish more of or more efficiently through this new channel. Think about how this will improve the service you provide to your customers.

Make Sure Your Message and Channel-Specific Experiences Are Consistent

Whether on or off social media, building your brand’s good name depends on always coming through for your customers.

One reason is that reliability increases with constancy. If your clients have faith in your ability to meet their demands, they will have every incentive to keep working with you in the years to come.

Keep in mind that being consistent also displays the genuineness of your brand. Being reliable demonstrates to clients that you care about their success over the long haul and aren’t just out for a quick buck.

Maintaining such uniformity will have a significant effect on your company’s bottom line: Lucidpress discovered in their 2019 report that maintaining brand integrity can boost sales by 33%.

Still, there are a lot of moving parts to maintaining a continuous social media presence.

To begin, maintain uniformity within the primary channel. So what does this mean?

Regularly posting information that is both educational and useful
Finding a way to link your many sections together to form a whole
The practise of giving all of a channel’s material the same voice, tone, and style.

Optimize and mechanise your interactions on social media.

There shouldn’t be any unnecessary friction in the process of social media brand building, either for your staff or your customers.

Your social media efforts, on the other hand, should fit naturally into the routines of your team and the interactions your brand has with its customers.

(It could be counterproductive if it reduces the efficiency of your staff as a whole or if it causes disruptions in the customer’s entire experience with your business.)

In any case, your content development process should be your primary priority.

Keeping up a steady social media presence is essential, as we discussed earlier. You need content designs and calendars to ensure the constant publication of high-quality branded material.