Social Media Branding Guide 2022

Social media branding is one of the most important aspects of online marketing. In today’s world, it is difficult to be successful without some sort of social media presence. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the top three platforms that consumers utilize the most. If you’re not reaching your target audience in these areas, it’s time to take action! Social media branding can help your business generate leads, gain new clients and more.

This guide should help you uncover strategies to ensure a consistent social media branding across multiple social networks.

1. Cover your basics

When it comes to branding and social media, it is vital that you are consistent. Being up-to-date with the newest trends is a part of doing business today, but having a consistently branded presence will help you in the long run.

Make sure that your logo, color palette, bio, boilerplate and handles are used across every network you are active on. We won’t go into the minute details of a basic branding, but what you do want to make sure is that you have is a consistent logo, color palette, bio, boilerplate and handle.

Some companies like to change logo styling slightly between networks depending on how small the allotted photo space is and the interests of those specific audiences. Whichever you choose, the most important thing is to ensure your profiles have a common thread that people will recognize as your brand.

Actions Steps

• Make sure that your social media accounts reflect the look and feel of your brand.
• Ensure logos, banners, bios, posting cadences are consistent with your brand guidelines, and audit regularly.
• Make sure you’re posting on a consistent schedule consistently and that your content aligns with the look and feel of the branding you’ve established.

2. Extends your Visual Branding

When you think about your brand, you probably think of a few things: your logo, your color scheme, your font and maybe even some imagery or messaging. All of these things together make up your brand. When it comes to social media, you want to extend that branding as much as possible across networks.

There’s no doubt that you need to create different content for each network, but when it comes to the visual aspects of your brand, consistency is key. You want people to immediately know they are seeing one of your posts before they even look at the handle or profile picture.

So how do you make this happen? Let’s take a look at what needs to be consistent across all networks and how you can create that consistency.

Action Steps

• Choose a color scheme, start by choosing a core set of colors and use them in some way on every network.
• Create images that incorporate your branding even more by including your logo, colors or other visual elements that you associate with your brand.
• Use templates to create consistent designs for images, videos and other content types across networks.

3. Develop your marketing personas

Marketing personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. These are the people who will buy from you repeatedly, will spread the word about your products and services and help you grow.

Your marketing personas are going to vary between the networks. Audiences on TikTok are younger than audiences on Facebook. This is the reality and if you use the same content across both networks, it’s possible that it won’t resonate the same way. To this end, it’s best to create multiple personas for your own marketing efforts.

Start with the company’s customer base and then map them to the different social media networks you use. For example, your Twitter account could target millennial parents while your Instagram account targets small business owners. Having these established personas per network helps you narrow down your content ideas and maybe even adjust your voice.

Action Steps

• Create multiple marketing personas and assign the social media networks that match
• Examine your networks’ different demographics or set up listening queries if you need to get to know your audience
• Create content to match the personas

4. Establish your brand voice & tone

What is your company’s personality? How do you talk to your customers in person? Are you friendly and fun-loving or more educational and direct? Your brand voice should be consistent across all channels, but the tone may vary slightly depending on the platform. For example, Snapchat is a much more casual platform than LinkedIn, so while you may use the same words, the way you say them should be different.

Action Steps

• Understand who your customers are.
• Know where your customers are and what motivates them.
• Define the goals you want to achieve with your content marketing.
• Create a sample persona of what a typical customer looks like based on your research.
• Decide what you want them to think or feel when they interact with your brand.

5. Create multiple accounts for different areas of focus

Having one main account is a must for most businesses, but if you’re a larger company with multiple products or services, it can be hard to consistently serve the needs of your audience from just one account. You may actually want to consider splitting up your social presence into multiple accounts.

Here are some benefits of this approach:

• Branding and messaging are more focused. Each account will have its own unique identity, which means you can create specific ad campaigns that relate directly to each.
• You can cater to different audiences. If you have an audience of young adults, they may appreciate different content than an older audience would. By having different accounts, you’ll be able to serve up content that appeals more directly to each one.
• Each account has a more clear purpose. Instead of trying to cover all of your bases in one account, each handle will have its own purpose, helping drive engagement and increase your reach and visibility.

Action Steps

• make sure that you have the bandwidth to maintain all of your accounts.
• use social media management tools
• create a social media calendar that outlines who is responsible for posting what content and when you are going to post it.

In Conclusion

Social media branding is one of the most effective ways for businesses today to market themselves, and it can be used for more than just a simple “like” or “follow.” It’s time to really utilize your social media presence and get your business noticed.

If you’re ready to improve your social media branding, hire a professional provider today!

Check our Social Media Branding Portfolio