With the emergence of technology, social media has become a powerful tool because it's a public forum that hosts millions of content creators. In this space, visibility and influence are coveted. Thus, it is important to understand how to use social media for branding.
Social media is more often than ever used to connect with your friends and family. It has evolved as a networking web that if used effectively, can generate business for your business.
Use Social Media for Branding
There are two essential ingredients to build your brand online using social media. First, to understand what social media has to offer and second, how to keep improving so that you get the maximum benefit.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. - Jeff Bezos - Chairman & CEO Amazon
A social media platform is not only a powerful marketing tool but is way more than that. With a right social media platform, you can generate leads, enhance customer support and engagement, and build brand awareness.
To leverage the power of social media, it is imperative that you keep track of your business goals against your marketing strategies. Analyze your metric against your business goals and evaluate it, so that you can tweak your marketing strategies.
How to Approach Social Media?
As it's important to use a right social media platform to reach your target audience, it is also important how you approach it. You should create strategies, define a mode of communication and build your brand voice.
Define Your Target Audience
Your targeted audience is a set of customers are most likely to purchase your products or services. There are many ways in which you can define your target audience like age, gender, geography, interests and many other factors.
Analyze and Understand Your Buyer's Persona
One of the best ways to gather this information is by client interviews, and conducting surveys. Once you have the data, analyze the data to segregate the age, gender, and interests of the users.
Analyze Competitors
Marketers can gather data and analyze that based on what their competitors are doing. Who is buying from the competition and how they are doing it.
Define Who Is Not Your Target Audience
In order to define your target audience understand, you should first know who are not your target audience. This lets you focus on the right group of people and then create plans to align with their needs.
Use Tools to Analyze
Tools like Google-analytics gives an in depth analysis of data about the users visiting your site. How the users are engaging with your site? How much time a user is spending on your site, also gives you an idea of how engaging your content is. The tool helps you in making calculated decisions.
Review & Revise
You should constantly review and tweak so that you reach to the right audience.
Select Your Social Media Channel
Many channels and networks are sprawling on internet like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more. And they may not be fit for businesses of all types. It's very important to understand that which platform best suits for your business needs, and you can use that social media for branding.
Every platform tailors to the needs of certain businesses that require specific features. Lets deep dive into these platforms to see what is best for your business.
Facebook - a Hub
The primary reason people used Facebook for is to share music and status updates with their friends and family. In recent times Facebook has evolved as a business favorite, and you can even create a page to sell your products or services.
With 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform. There are outstanding statistics of Facebook that makes it the best place to advertise for your business. HubSpot published a blog on 63 Facebook Statistics to know for 2021, which gives you an idea of how massively Facebook has grown.
Benefits of Facebook
There are some potential and unexpected benefits that Facebook offers not only for personal use but for business too.
Creating Groups & Pages
You can create groups and pages, and promote your business. Facebook is a very interactive platform that gives you flexibility to schedule your post, and respond to comments and questions. So that, you can effectively connect with your audience.
Low-Cost Marketing Tool
Social media marketing, a term that has redefining marketing strategies. Facebook offers some out of the box marketing strategies that you can use to expand your business horizon and that too at low-cost.
It's ideal for small businesses with budgetary constraints, but large companies also use them to check the market dynamics.
Raise Brand Awareness
Facebook gives you a platform to reach 2.8 billion users, so that you can focus on creating effective content. It is a matter of fact that when people start liking your content, you can reach any part of the world.
Once a user likes your page, they start getting updates from your business right on their wall. This indeed a cool feature to build your brand awareness and bring your brand closer to your target audience.
Targeted Advertisement
Facebook offers a paid targeted advertisement service. With this service you can focus a segment of users, and target your products or services promotions. Facebook analyses the user profiles based on your targeting options and delivers your ads to them.
For example - you sell musical instruments, and will want to sell it to users who are interested in music. In which case Facebook creates a pool of users who are interested in music, and delivers your product ads on their pages.
Facebook is ideal for Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers, and hence B2C giants benefits the most from it.
LinkedIn - a Professional Hub
Initially, LinkedIn was a professional networking, and allowed users to build their professional portfolio. It was a medium where an employer posts the jobs and an employee applies to them. However, over the course of time and with its acquisitions,
LinkedIn has become a popular Social Networking platform for professionals and businesses. It's like you are connecting with different businesses in a conference.
With 740 million active users in 2020, LinkedIn has expanded its horizon to become one of the top-notch social media platform for professionals. Read through these mind-blowing 31 LinkedIn statistics published on HubSpot blog making LinkedIn a choice for many organizations.
Benefits of LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers some smart benefits that businesses can leverage to get noticed.
Create Company Page
You can use LinkedIn Company Page to create your business profile. It works very different from a brand page on Facebook or Google+, specifically in terms of the way the content you share it across.
Along with this you also can create dedicated pages for your products, services, events or brands making it easy to track and promote. Like Showcase Pages that lets you target your audience.
Reaching Target Markets
Through LinkedIn company page, you can connect with prospecting networks, build business relationships and virtually interact at a high level. You get to choose if you want to share your content with a subset of your followers or to everyone. You can also target your updates based on Language, Job Functions, Geography, Industry and more.
Be Ahead of Your Competition
Almost 94% of Business to Business (B2B) marketers use LinkedIn to promote their products and services. LinkedIn makes it easier for you to monitor how the industry is changing.
You can be ahead of your competition by analyzing how other companies are building their content marketing strategies in your sector. LinkedIn gives you insights on the trends and dynamics of your industry that lets you plan ahead of time.
Lead Generation
LinkedIn lets businesses focus on leads generation where you can focus on prospective businesses to attract, engage and eventually strike a deal. With LinkedIn, you can target the companies that needs your products or services.
LinkedIn is an ideal platform for all the business to business (B2B) marketers. You can enhance your company's opportunities, build a brand following, generate leads and more with the power of LinkedIn.
Twitter - a Microblogging Hub
Twitter is a virtual social media forum where people like to discuss, share their thoughts, opinions and comment on messages or posts. It has become a popular microblogging service. In Twitter world, you call messages or posts as 'tweets'.
An advertising audience of 330 million monthly active users, Twitter is a popular social media networking platform.
What makes Twitter popular?
Twitter is popular because millions of users login to their accounts daily, and spend a considerable amount of time on the platform. They browse stories, news, the latest trends and more. Get yourself acquainted with Twitter's popularity statistics published on word stream.
Benefits of Twitter
When communication and brand awareness is on your business cards, then Twitter is the best place to start. There are a wide range of benefits Twitter offers that you can use for your business needs.
Communication
Twitter is an active platform. Millions of users share their views every microsecond, and this communication intensive platform ensures that you will always find the right audience.
Lead Generation
Twitter is often used to generate leads by publishing special offers or discounts or promotional deals that encourage your audience to potentially buy.
Trends Analysis
You can follow the tweets and get insights on their trending. You can use this feature to chalk out your analysis on what is trending, what interests your target audience, what their views and more. This in depth analysis gives you a better way to approach your marketing strategies.
B2C businesses use Twitter as part of their marketing strategies. But, there are also a number of B2B businesses, that use Twitter for their marketing needs. Thus, making Twitter a popular choice for B2C as well as B2B businesses.
Create Engaging Content Using Copywriting
Now that you know which social media platform is best for promoting your business, it is important to create engaging content. Copywriting is an inevitable part of your marketing strategy that lets you create different types of content that helps to engage with your audience.
Brand Awareness
Your copy focuses on the objective that you have set for your brand/service or product. Your copy aligns with your business goals and helps in your brand awareness. It plays a vital role in using social media for branding.
Engage With Your Audience
One way of engaging with your audience is to write copies asking them questions - for example tell me your ideas. A copy should encourage your audience to strike a conversation, interact with your post and share views.
Grab Attention
Social media users are afraid of missing out on the upcoming events, sales and more. This motivates users to stay connected. Fear of missing out is a great way of creating social media copy to grab your audience attention.
Emotional Resonance
Use personal stories to connect with your audience. It allows your customers to identify themselves.
Copies for Your Social Media Platform
Every social media platform is different, with its own constraints. And thus it is important that you create a copy for the platform that you have chosen for your marketing. It ensures that your copy reaches to your audience complete and makes sense to them.
Call to Action
Copywriting ensures that the content you share always has a call to action associated with it. Whether it is to draw traffic to your website, promote your content, or encourages your customer to buy.
With these intricate qualities, copywriting focuses on enriching your brand awareness, featuring your brand voice and building your brand online.
Track Your Performance
You have put up best plan in practice, but if you are not able to validate it, you are in big trouble. In order to understand that your strategies and methodologies aligns with your business goals it becomes essential for you to track their performance.
It can be quite overwhelming to choose from a lot of metrics available in market to measure your social media platforms.
A thumb rule - your social media metrics should directly associate with your business goals. So, you track one metric for one business goal.
Every social media platform has their own analytics tools like Twitter has Twitter analytics. For Instagram, you need business accounts to view data.
If you are just starting out or running low on your marketing budget then use in-built analytical tools offered by the social media platform.
You should start looking at some common metrics.
Engagement
Engagement metrics gives you an idea of how actively users engage with your content. For example - You can track likes, comments, shares or retweets and clicks.
Awareness
Impressions and reach are the most commonly used metrics that you should look at to understand your brand awareness. You should consider these metrics if the primary goal of your marketing strategy is to promote your brand awareness.
Return on Investment
ROI is often a very important metrics used by businesses to understand the return on investments. Companies in e-commerce space like Shopify, or companies where conversions to sales are important track these metrics.
These metrics will give you a holistic view of your social media performance, and helps you make necessary changes relevant to your business.
Takeaway
Social media has the potential to grow your brand in addition to socializing with co-workers. It’s important to realize how social media can benefit your company.
With proper tools and a plan in place, you can have a productive social media strategy. A strategy that recreates the overall benefits of using social media for branding.
Build your brand online today! Request a free consultation on how social media copywriting can help you use social media for branding.