Social media branding has become an effective vehicle for boosting your brand’s digital marketing strategies. When it only takes around 10 seconds to make an impression with your target audience, you need to use optimization strategies to affect consumer decisions.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) gives your brand the needed edge to stand out from your competitors and increase your followers or subscribers. It is crucial in getting leads and increasing conversions to keep your brand relevant and thriving.
Indeed, new normal business strategies are necessary to thrive in these changing and challenging times. Social media branding is one way to bring your brand to the next level successfully.
Around 76% of businesses aim for brand awareness via social media channels. Indeed, social media has enormous potential for growing your brand through digital marketing and cultivating deeper trust with your customers.
What is Social Media Branding?
The goal of social media branding is to manage your brand’s profile, reputation, and positioning. Your branding must remain consistent even as you echo it across various channels, including social media. Having a clear social media branding reinforces your impact as a brand.
Moreover, when you optimize your social media branding, you allow your brand to be more discoverable online, especially since 53.6% (4.2 billion) of the world’s population (7.83 billion) are on social media. You strengthen consumer loyalty and improve customer experience dramatically. All these contribute to increasing your revenue as a brand and hopefully foregoing such a dependence on paid strategies.
Image Source: We Are Social
People go to social media because it is more personalized, curated to users’ unique preferences. Even for content usually accessed through the web and other media, people simply log in to their social media account for the latest news and information.
With the staggering number of active social media users worldwide, you need to master social media branding and get the best chances of reaching your target audience and unique marketing goals.
5 Optimisation Tips for Social Media Branding
Here are several optimization strategies you can use right now to get your brand recognized and trending on social media:
Use the Most Effective Social Network Based on Your Target Audience
Aside from knowing precisely what your identity is as a brand, your target market must also be clear to you for your social media branding strategies to work. Instead of a hit-and-miss campaign, why not cover the basics first. Research who you are targeting, their demographics, and what social media platforms they are using.
Get valuable analytics data such as keywords and search intent, time of day they are most active, buying behavior, and general response to marketing campaigns like paid ads and the like. It is critical to get accurate information about your target audience to know who you are directing your marketing efforts.
For instance, if you target B2B and B2C companies (business-to-business and business-to-consumer) or even Micro-SaaS companies, you need to have a professional-looking, high-quality website. You also need to use social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Google My Business.
You may set-up business accounts on Facebook and Instagram as well. Both platforms are great for increasing the buzz around your brand and establishing authority. However, do not expect to get the bulk of your conversions from them.
Additional digital marketing and automation strategies should be employed, like automated email marketing campaigns along with other SEO strategies.
These different social media platforms usually provide their analytics to their consumers, so you can identify if it is the right platform to pour efforts into. Needless to say, it is not about the number of platforms you are on, but how relevant and efficient those platforms are to your social media branding campaigns.
You can open accounts in two to three significant platforms your target audience supports and concentrate your SMO strategies there. When you know your niche well, you will have a clearer insight into your social media branding strategies to make your business stand out from the competition and nurture more profound relationships with new and existing customers.
Take Advantage of Brand Personalization to Boost SMO
Personalization is essential to its social media strategy because it has a fundamental effect on engagements, consumer buying behavior, conversion rates, and SMO success. 
More than 59% of customers admit that personalization affects their buying decisions. Amazon has perfected the art of personalization. The millions of dollars in revenue they make per month from both repeat and new clients proves this. If an already successful company like Amazon still takes the time to do that up to this day, all the more should other businesses follow, even startups and small-scale companies.
Personalization makes you more appealing to customers and increases their trust in your brand. Gain valuable insight into the traits, attitudes, and lifestyles that your target market values, and formulate personalization strategies and execute strategic marketing decisions
See a sample of a successful social media branding campaign from Coca Cola:
The “Share a Coke” campaign is a highly-effective case of campaign personalization. The company engaged customers by making name badges for the logo. It triggered the spread of coke with others. The hash #shareacoke also took off and went viral on social media.
Create Content that is User-Friendly and Engaging
Since it’s social media, it’s a given that you need to use eye-catching content every time. You cannot just stick with all-text content, or you’ll miss out on your market. In fact, a person’s brain can consume images 60,000 times faster than just text.
It is why you need to incorporate pro-grade images and stunning videos into your campaigns.
Here is an example of an IG post by Starbucks. It normally uses User-Generated Content (UGC) as part of its campaigns, especially since UGC is now a trend. Despite utilizing UGC content, the Starbucks brand remains the same, easily recognizable because of its world-famous logo. You just know it’s Starbucks when you see that cup design and logo. The brand gathers photos from its fans who upload submissions for numerous #hashtag campaigns.
Image Source: Starbuck IG Account
Use design styles your target market identifies with. You are not designing not just for your brand but for them too. Sometimes, designers tend to get stuck with their preferences and design habits.
Ensure that your design is a perfect balance between representing who you are as a brand while keeping relevant with your target market. Use design elements like typography, empty spaces, colors, and themes to convey your message, and always be caught up with the latest design trends.
Slay with Storytelling as an SMO Strategy
Storytelling is a web design strategy that makes brands more exciting and trustworthy. To stay relevant in 2021, your websites and digital marketing campaigns must delve into new approaches to continually draw audiences in.
When you provide a backstory or convey content in narrative form, your content marketing strategies become more effective in appealing to consumer’s emotions. There is fierce competition on social media, so your brand must be distinct. You keep the customers intrigued by your brand’s story.
Furthermore, video storytelling brings more value to your content. Videos are more engaging than text and images and compact a thousand words in a few minutes of video-all video annoying and repulsive video ads that turn audiences off, so focus on making your stories stick rather than pushing for a sale. When your stories stick, your sales will follow naturally. Follow with authenticity, ensuring that there are high-quality products or services behind your compelling videos and imagery.
Harness a video’s emotional strength by tapping into people’s search intent and preferences. And at the end of the video, include a solid and relevant CTA (call-to-action) that matches your story or post.
Guard the Authenticity of Your Social Media Brand
Establish and grow a distinctive personality, character, and context so you can make a good impression every time, be it with new audiences or existing ones.
Strategize how you will tell your brand’s story in the best way possible through your posts, your design, your logo, and the like. Optimize strategies to create and reinforce brand individuality. Create fresh and original ideas that echo your brand’s uniqueness compared to other websites in your niche. You need to be relatable, yes, but you need to have that edge in branding to be more memorable with your target niche.
Strive to give your audience opportunities to experience your brand in a personal, unique way. You could, for example, run a hashtag campaign in which users submit their photos or images. It could also be something so simple as adding a comment section to your stories or engaging with your audience on hot topics.
User-generated content (UGC) on social media is rising, bringing value to your brand and a better user experience (UX).
Again, video is a powerful form of UGC that links your brand with your audience in ways that other media cannot. On YouTube, UGC videos for a brand are viewed ten times more than official brand videos.
UGC videos offer audience-trusted feedback that can increase customer interest in your brand.
Even if you don’t have enough in your content team to produce videos solely, you can always create videos like a pro with the right video editing tools to boost your video marketing.
Conclusion: Social Media Marketing Enhances Branding
Businesses see social media networks as modern marketing and advertising outlets. Strategic social media marketing can help businesses thrive and even come out of this global crisis victoriously.
SMEs (small-to-medium-sized enterprises) must also take full advantage of social media marketing for business growth. Strengthen your branding strategies using social media platforms to reinforce your SEO strategies today.
Mayleen Meñez used to work in media before finding her true passion in NGO work, travelling the Philippines and Asia doing so. She homeschools 3 kids and loves reinventing Filipino dishes. She is a resident SEO writer for Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand.