Building a Brand With Social Media
It’s easy to overlook social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram while you’re brainstorming ways to build up your brand. However, that’s definitely a mistake. Social media has an incredibly far-reaching arm and can be used as a fantastic tool to command the views of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of potential clients — you just have to know that, and know how to use it properly.
The social media milieu has completely exploded over the past several years. It is not showing any signs of slowing down. This means that behind each icon on your smartphone, currently surfing the feeds of these various social platforms, is a vast audience of consumers — literally at your fingertips.
Understanding Your Audiences
That’s the first key step: understanding that people are viewing and listening to your social media feeds, and that those people are your audience: a sea of people you wish to transform into happily paying customers. In order to make that happen, however, you need to craft your online persona to attract these people.
Three billion people use various social media platforms on a month to month basis. Attracting them to your pages can be one of the most important steps for your brand! Let’s talk about the reasons that social media can be a fantastic tool for ensuring that your business is booming all of the time.
Use Social Media to Build Awareness of Your Brand
It’s a simple concept: if people don’t know about you, then they’re not going to click over to your site. Therefore, they will not learn about your services. Perhaps even worse, if people know about you but have no idea what you’re about, they’re not going to click over, either! Having and curating great social media feeds is quick and easy. It’s a way to make sure that people can see you on a regular basis. This helps your message to be the first thing that they see.
It’s a relatively low-investment strategy to get views. While you do have to put in the time to curate great social media presence, it doesn’t cost anything to get business platforms on most of the major social media websites. Take the time to set up your profiles. Then brainstorm a social media strategy, based on what you want to get out of it.
Do you have a service to sell? Do you want to be an advisor or a consultant? Are you more just focused on building the biggest audience you can, as fast as you can? All of these things can be broadcasted via social media as long as you think carefully about what you want to put out there—and then you do it.
Use Social Media to Set Yourself Up as an Authority Figure
When people don’t know what to do about something, they turn to someone else who knows better. This is the bedrock of networking and influencing and basic education. With social media, you have an opportunity to use your platform to finagle your way into people’s brains. So, when they are confused about something, your name is the first thing they think of.
To do this, take time to develop a strategy and think about how you and your brand want to be seen. What field are you in? What would it take for you to be seen as one of the ones perpetually in the know and ahead of the curve in that field? If needed, get assistance from an experienced professional. Once you’ve answered those questions, take some time to put together some content addressing those concerns, and post them to your social media channels.
It might not garner you sales or clients instantaneously, but what you put out there will start a conversation; and it will help people think that you know what you’re talking about. If you do this often enough, your name will become synonymous with your field—which is just about the best marketing you could hope for.
Use Social Media to Show that You are Authentic
Authenticity is a buzzword in the twenty-first century for a reason. People, more and more, want to feel like they are doing business with other people. They’re looking for down to earth people, like them. This involves breaking down the idea that you are an impersonal business, becoming very accessible, and sharing parts of yourself that may seem trivial or even uncomfortable.
Taking the time to connect with those who view your feeds may seem like a softer science, but if you come across as a friend, more people will want to learn about you and your services. This is more of an art than anything else; you’ll need to think about the tone that best goes with your brand, for starters. Is the voice you want to associate with your brand more of a funny, witty, acerbic one? Or do you think it leans more compassionate and vulnerable?
Once you’ve chosen a general tone, you’re going to want to practice it — often. Everything you write needs to feel like it’s being written by you, and you need your chosen brand personality to shine through in order to do that!
Practicing and investing in this engaging, personable feel to your feed is an invaluable asset in making sure that your brand is one that people will want to speak with; and, as you know, if you can speak with people, that’s one of the first steps in client conversion.
Use Social Media to Build Engagement Among Your Following
Along those lines, if you can use your feed to get people to talk to each other — in a very digitized version of a party, for example, or a mixer or other networking event — they’ll remember your feed more, and want to come back to it more often.
You can complete this by having that personable, disarming candor about your account; you can do this by posting pictures and inviting people to comment on them. However, perhaps one of the best ways you can do this and subtly get the message across about your brand is simply by hosting question and answer sessions often. You’ll get to speak with your following. Also, you can carefully craft answers that will get people more interested in what you offer. It’s truly a win-win situation for everyone involved.
Use Social Media as a Way to Support Others
The best way to engage with your audience is to offer them something of value. If people know they can rely on you and your brand through your feed for quality products, they’ll come flocking back, every time. You can do this through content creation — making and posting infographics and videos related to your field, for example. However, there are many other ways that you can support both your audience and other feeds in ways that will promote your brand organically.
Think of it this way: Perhaps you’ve interacted with a customer service line in the past to find out more information about a blackout or a product or an ingredient. Today, instead of calling, most people simply go to a company’s social media feed. It’s easy to learn what they need to know. Use your feed, to give periodic updates on things that your audience will want to know. This is another way to support your audience.
Another way to do this involves addressing people’s concerns. No one wants to have customer quibbles to deal with, but it happens to everyone. If you’re able to carefully and helpfully guide a complaining customer to a helpful resource or solution, that customer is more likely to come back; and, if you’re able to do this publicly through social media customer service feeds, others will see just how helpful you’re being.
It’s also a great way to encourage you and your staff to be ultra-polite to your followers. Everything is very, very public, so you have extra incentive to be wonderful at all times! Think of your social media feed as a way to support people who will later be supporting you. It’s easier to ensure that everything you put out is caring and your best quality work.
Don’t Ignore It
Building a brand with Social media platforms is something that cannot be ignored. It’s a tool to garner customers, clients, and press about your brand. A carefully curated and effective social media feed is crucial. You can use that as a way to build your voice, engage with your audience and increase customer conversion. It can also help solve problems before they have any time to fester.
Take the time to invest in your social media profiles. Making sure that your social media strategy is evolving is one of the best ways to grow your small business. However, that won’t just happen overnight! Take the first step today and start your business profiles. Tomorrow will be a new day to help more people. To help them discover just how crucial your brand will be in their lives.
