Social Media Branding Guidelines
Social media has quickly become one of the most powerful tools to market your brand. With over 3 billion users of social networks across the globe, the ability to reach a large variety of consumers has never been more within reach. Social media is a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to communicate with millions of users.
For any company that wants to stay relevant in the 21st century, it is necessary to put time and effort into your social media platforms. On Instagram alone, 80% of users follow at least one business. One way to ensure that you are getting the most out of social media is through branding guidelines. Every company, no matter their size, should have brand consistency across its entire social network.
What is social media branding?
Social media branding is about being consistent in the methods used to interact and engage with your target audience. Essentially, it is how you manage the company image, the brand identity, and position within the industry. It includes creating a style that is compatible across all platforms. Your style should be evident within the profile name, content, design, and tone. When implemented correctly, just some of the benefits of social media branding include:
Generating leads
Increasing sales
Improving communication with users
Increasing brand awareness
Positive reputation management
More audience engagement
Why do you need social media branding guidelines?
As a business owner, you know the importance of creating social media platforms for your company. However, you may not appreciate how critical it is to have aesthetically appealing and thematic profiles that reflect your brand. Having explicit and achievable social media branding guidelines will help you reach your business goals and generate long-term business.
A few common social media goals for businesses include increasing awareness, lead generation, customer loyalty, sales, and customer service. Before deciding upon social media branding, it is essential that you know exactly what you want to achieve, short-term and long-term. Determining your main goals early on in the branding phase will ensure you integrate those objectives within each post and overall profile image.
What your guide should include
Before creating your branding for your social media platforms, there are a few things that your style guide should include.
Your social media accounts
As a business owner, it’s better to focus on one or a few social media platforms before setting out to conquer them all. Decide on a few mediums that you feel best suit your company and how you want to interact with consumers. It’s best to focus your attention on growing a few platforms rather than putting minimal effort into several.
Keeping that information in mind, make a list of every social account that you want to use or is currently in use for your brand. Then you can work towards creating a consistent style across all channels so that they integrate seamlessly.
Target market
Before you can develop your brand’s persona, you will need to have a defined target market and information on your audience. Describe how they would think, their needs, how they might search for products or their interests. Developing a solid understanding of who your target audience is and how you should speak to them is critical in developing your brand.
Use this time in branding your business as an opportunity to go on social media platforms and look for existing trends in the market. Find users who fall into your target market and record what accounts they follow, engage with, or comment on. Finding out this specific information will help you in creating your content.
Tone and voice
Once you’ve established what social media platforms you will use and the target market, you will need to clearly define your brand’s voice and tone. Whether you decide on a fun and quirky style or classy and sophisticated, the key is to keep it consistent across your platforms. For example, the tone of your blog should be the same in tweets on Twitter or captions on Instagram. By doing this, you’ll connect with your audience and work towards building a solid brand image.
How to create a social media style guide
Considering the importance of creating a style for your social media platforms, following a guideline will benefit your short and long-term growth. To ensure you are organized, consistent, and creating content that supports your brand, here are a few steps to follow.
Step 1: Social channels
Choosing the right social media platforms for your brand will help you to achieve your goals. There are several platforms to use, each with its different kind of content. For example, Twitter is primarily a written text platform where you can attach images, videos, and GIFs. Conversely, Instagram is comprised mainly of photo and video content supported by a written caption.
Deciding on the right social platform can depend on what content you feel best represents your business. Each medium has its unique tools to grow your page further, so if you think that posting creative videos on TikTok better suits your brand than short tweets, it will guide you towards selecting the right platforms.
Regardless of the platform(s) chosen, it is essential to keep the profile name the same across all social channels. This consistent name will allow users to find your various pages easily.
Step 2: Style of communication
The tone and voice of your brand will make up the persona of communication across all of your social media platforms. When deciding upon the style, it is helpful to ask what your brand’s personality is and how it can relate to your target audience. A few examples of tones for your style guide include:
Energetic
Trendy
Political or non-political
Genuine
Sarcastic
Funny
Friendly
Remember that this is a direct reflection of your brand, so portraying certain traits such as sarcasm might alienate people, or it could be spot on for what you want to achieve!
Step 3: Guidelines for content creation
Creating a plan for your content is essential to make sure your posts are consistent, organized, and effective. If your business uses social media as an outlet to connect with consumers, it’s essential to post frequently to keep users engaged with your profiles. When planning your content, there are a few questions to ask yourself:
Will I share videos, images, or both?
How will I format the posts?
How often do I want to post?
How many of the posts will be promotional?
Do I want to follow a theme for my page?
Do I want to focus on a specific colour palette?
Will I be interactive with my followers?
Using these questions to plan your social media platforms will ensure that your content remains relevant and stands out to consumers. Keep in mind that authentic and honest content is essential in building a trustworthy brand online.
Step 4: Response to the public
One of the upsides of social media is the open communication your business can have with countless users worldwide. However, being a company with a social media page comes with myriad challenges and responsibilities. Deciding how you will respond in certain tricky situations is an important and sometimes overlooked step.
At times, your company will have to respond to public complaints, negative reviews, and issues within the industry. In addition, many businesses have taken to social media platforms to show their support for specific worldwide political concerns. This type of response is becoming increasingly expected of companies from the public and should be considered when planning how you respond to certain issues.
Takeaways
Developing the presence of your business online is highly beneficial in such a heavily digital age. Although there are many aspects to consider with social media branding, the main takeaway is consistency across all platforms and staying true to your brand. Users will appreciate authenticity and honesty over content that is too carefully curated and insincere. Keeping this information in mind when creating and planning your content and a concerted effort to consistently be on the platform will ensure that your social account will grow to impact your business positively.
FAQs
What are the benefits of creating social media branding?
Social media is essential to any business, no matter the industry, size, or field. There are countless benefits from creating a solid social media brand, such as:
Improved brand loyalty
Greater brand awareness
Better engagement with customers
Improved customer satisfaction/service
Increased awareness in the market
Higher traffic
Enhanced SEO rankings
Proper social media branding should not be overlooked when developing your marketing strategy and instead should be a focal point to your digital growth. Social media is an excellent way to connect with customers, increase awareness for your company, and promote products or services. Utilizing various platforms for your business online provides the opportunity to reach consumers daily. Frequent exposure will eventually convert into leads and sales and increased success for your business.
Building your social media platforms with clear branding guidelines will ensure that you have the best chance of attracting attention. Knowing your target market and creating content that truly connects with those consumers will guarantee you a competitive advantage. Social media branding allows your business to grow while always staying connected and relevant.
How does social media branding impact the user?
Social media branding focuses on engaging with your target audience throughout various platforms. The purpose of it is to increase brand awareness and build trust among users interested in your brand. If done correctly, social media branding can improve the experience for the user, which will result in more attention towards your brand.
Creating engaging, creative, unique, aesthetically pleasing, informative, or educational platforms will attract more users. If your content is consistent across all platforms, it will be easier for the user to recognize you elsewhere and build a relationship with your company.
How do I integrate social media marketing across different platforms?
Throughout the various social media platforms you may use for your business, it is crucial to keep content reasonably consistent. However, depending on the site, posting frequency and certain content can look different. For example, you may choose to post more frequently on Twitter than you would on LinkedIn. Or you may post an image on Facebook, whereas you’d post more short videos on Instagram. The ideal is that to a viewer, it all appears to be published by the same company, with the same persona and the same iconography, regardless of medium.
Although the type of post and frequency of posting is important, implementing your branding across the platforms should still depict your brand image and follow your primary marketing goals.
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