How Social Media Can Build Your Brand

Now more than ever, there are more opportunities for brands to connect and engage with customers on multiple platforms.

A social media presence can raise the level of trust that customers have in your brand. No other form of media has been able to facilitate such a strong emotional connection between consumers and a brand.

You’ve probably seen the numbers: Up to 56% of online consumers form a deeper connection with companies that are on social media.

While visual elements such as avatars, logo or background images are vital to brand building on social media, this is just the start of the process of establishing a long term connection with your audience.

Here are two steps to building a successful brand on social media:

Position yourself to be an authority

Many brands are sold on the idea that social media is a place to generate leads with the goal of making sales. Yet, users are on social media to build relationships and connect with friends, family and their favorite brands.

What does this mean for business branding?

Forget about marketing or promoting your product on social media. Instead, you want to position yourself as an expert or an authority in your field by offering quality, consistent and relevant information to your target audience.

Think about it: Many of the successful brands are popular because of the fascinating content they share whether that’s a 6 minute video, a Pinterest DIY, a YouTube tutorial or images on Facebook. While these brands do have a business goal in mind, they share content that has the end-users’ (followers, fans, customers and prospects) interest at heart.

Different types of content work best on different platforms. Even then, your branding goal should be to position yourself as an expert in your field through the type of content you share.

Storytelling should be an important aspect of your content strategy. Successful brand storytelling has the ability to move the spotlight away from just your products and shine it on characters (real or fictional) that your audience can form an emotional connection with.

It’s all about building trust and engagement

Consumers take their business to companies they can trust. Social media has made it possible for users to discern and see right through a trustworthy brand or one that cannot be trusted.

What does trust have to do with it?

Branding entails positioning you or your company in the best light possible to be able to reach out and emotionally connect with your target audience.

For people to want to connect with your brand or be emotionally (and financially) invested in it, they need to be sure that you have their interests at heart.

On social media, trust is really about reputation management, customer service and genuine engagement.

Customer service: Are you able to immediately support your customers when they need assistance with using your product? Are you able to provide prompt answers and make their lives easier?

Genuine engagement: Is your social profile a place that connects consumers to each other and to your brand, or is it a platform for broadcasting your sales and marketing agenda? Starting relevant conversations, participating in conversations started by your followers, availing useful information all amount to genuine engagement that leads to trust.

Reputation management: Bad news can spread very fast on social media. Whether you are a one-person team or you have a group managing your social platforms, you have to be keen about managing your brand’s reputation. This calls for listening to social conversations about your brand and responding appropriately, especially to negative comments, complaints and questions.

Social Media Branding

A good first impression is certainly relevant in helping to build your brand. Attractive visual elements across all your social media profiles are valuable in creating a trustworthy impression for your brand.

More importantly, brand building on social media hinges on your ability to establish your brand as an authority among others that are offering the same products. Whether you are sharing videos, images, blog posts, or contests, the primary goal of business branding on social media is to build trust which culminates in an emotional connection with your brand.