How to Build Your Brand on Social Media

When using social media platforms to grow your business, you must be willing to try new strategies and market your brand to audiences that may need help to engage. Through the power of tools like Instagram stories and TikTok Live, as well as influencer marketing, brands are finding new ways to expand and go viral on social media.

Isn’t that what you’d like to do for your business? If you’re wondering how to build your brand on social media, get more followers, and even open up new revenue streams, this is the best guide to building your brand on social media.

How to Build Your Brand on Social Media

While sharing content online seems easy to do these days, it’s a little bit more complicated when you want to create real branding strategies for social media to engage lots of followers and sell your services or products.

Before you start building your personal or business brand on social media, you should do an inventory of all your social media accounts. What social media channels do you update the most? What channels and content give the most likes? What channels would you like to explore? By doing this quick inventory and listing some of your goals, you're already ahead of the game.

1. Know Your Brand and Your Goals

Does your brand need a marketing update? It’s important to always lead with your best foot forward on social media. What do you want your brand to look and feel like to your target audience? You should also know your strengths and weaknesses and outline your brand’s voice and tone. Do you want to be a friendly lifestyle brand, or do you want to be an edgy rockstar brand? Maybe it’s something more like a classic, sleek sports car. These branding exercises will help you know exactly how you want to present your brand online.

Next, you should identify your top goals. Are you just looking for more followers? How many followers in the next month? Year? Do you want to make money with your social media channels? How much?

Once you have your goals listed, you can start to form a strategy around these goals that will lead you to victory. However, every social media account has to start somewhere, and most of the time, that’s brand recognition.

2. Define Your Target Audience (But Think Community)

When setting up your brand for success, you’ll want to create content your audience will like. The first step is understanding who your audience is. You should conduct research by looking at your customers, competitors, similar brands, and other affinities that your audience share. You can develop personas that represent people in your target audience to help you identify their traits, what they like, and what brands they like–and what solutions you’ll provide.

You can also research demographics and psychographics, which will be important when developing your social media content, such as posts, images, videos, captions, and hashtags. Knowing what language your audience likes and uses is crucial to speaking with the right voice to attract them.

3. Pick the Best Platforms for Reach and Awareness

Do you know what social media channels your audience frequents the most? One key element of how to build your brand on social media starts with the platforms you choose. Your brand should have social media accounts on any channel your target audience is on. However, you can choose the best platforms based on the audience size, and then you can add more channels as your brand grows and you want to experiment with other channels.

Some brands make the mistake of starting with Facebook first, thinking it’s the biggest social network. While it’s important to have a profile on Facebook, your audience may get most of their content from Instagram or TikTok. It would be important to post more frequently on these channels rather than focusing all of your efforts on Facebook.

In addition, you may have a product or service, but your branding isn’t on point yet. You’ll want to ensure that your branding will appeal to the right audience on the platform. For example, Facebook audiences tend to be older and more conservative. In contrast, Instagram is for the 20s to 40s, while TikTok tends to trend younger (however, you will find some 30s to 40s audiences on this channel.)

Other channels are more important for content distribution, search engine optimization, and targeting very niche audiences. For example, if you own a furniture brand, you may want to add Pinterest to your playbook because you can post all of your furniture, styles, and must-haves on different boards with SEO titles and link them to your store or website.

4. Build Relationships with Influencers and Affinity Brands

Would you happen to know what brands your audience is obsessed with? Perhaps you’re an up-and-coming beauty brand selling new skin care products. You should include partnerships with influencers and affinity brands in your strategy. You can work with influencers to access audiences obsessed with beauty and unlock audiences by working with other brands that your audience would like.

These are called “collaborations.” Once you collaborate with a brand or influencer, your business can be seen by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, for that particular influencer or affinity brand.

You want to ensure that you’re picking the right influencers and brands to partner with, as it can be difficult to undo a bad review that doesn’t show your company in the best light. You’ll want to have a contract and agreements that specifically outline what you’re looking for from the influencer and the compensation and any guidelines around what they can and cannot post about your brand.

5. Promote Your Content and Keep Trends in Mind

Content promotion is key, but you want to do it in a way that will capture attention and save your efforts. You should use as many social media platforms as necessary to promote your content, but your posts shouldn’t be copies of one another. You also want to get people to share your content, so use hashtags and influencers to help you promote your content.

In addition, you should always stay updated on social media trends. For example, in 2023, most brands will hire content creators to create user-generated content (UGC) to promote their products instead of going with professional branding and sleek creatives. This is because people trust honest opinions and testimonials of products rather than super promotional advertisements.

You should also stay up-to-date on new social media tools and strategies. There are always new strategies to test with content distribution, content creation, and so forth. The best tools currently include Canva, Tailwind, Biteable, Zapier, Buffer, and Sendible.

How to Make Your Brand Successful on Social Media

There is much more to building your brand on social media, but this should give you a good starting point. The key to being successful on social media is to know your brand and tailor your strategies to specific audiences. You’ll want to pick the best platforms to reach your audience while delivering content daily to build brand recognition. If monetizing your social media, make sure you are using multiple tools, such as Buffer for social scheduling, email marketing sign-up (or opt-in forms), content creation tools, and mixing up your content between images and videos.

Lastly, using influencers and user-generated content in your content plan is better. This content is gold for social media because people trust when other users and popular influencers create reviews, testimonials, and guides that show how great your brand is from their point of view.
We hope that you have incredible success on social media. To grow your business even faster, subscribe to our small business newsletter for the latest news and tips on sales, marketing, social media, operations, finance, legal, human resources, and more.