If you’re running a business and doing it professionally, there’s no avoiding to brand your social media.

Social media is the place to be as a brand. Pretty much everyone (including your mom and your grandma) spends half of their waking hours checking their various social media platforms. And since the golden rule of marketing is “get people where they already are,” social media provides you with an A+ opportunity to connect with your audience, deliver your messaging and convert that audience into customers.

But you can’t just throw up a few social media profiles and expect business to start rolling in (if only it were that easy!). Just like you need a solid branding strategy for your business, if you want to be a social media success story, you need to brand yourself there, too.

Social media branding allows you to break through the clutter (and there’s a lot) so you’ll be easily recognizable to your target audience and ultimately drive more business, leads and sales.

But how, exactly, do you do that?

1. Keep your branding consistent across platforms

The most important element of social media branding? Consistency, consistency, consistency.

If your website has one brand style (specific colors, fonts, and product images), but your Facebook has a completely different look and feel… Which is totally different from your LinkedIn… And your Twitter too…

Well, you get the idea.

Inconsistent branding is confusing. Your audience expects to experience your brand in the same way, no matter where they’re experiencing it. Having an all-over-the-place brand on social media hurts your overall branding, your brand recognition, your engagement… And in the end, it hurts your sales.

When you’re creating your social media profiles, your brand DNA needs to be infused on each one. Got a brand color palette? Perfect. Use those colors on your profile. Have a hero image that people associate with your brand? Great. Use it as a Facebook or Twitter cover photo. Got a logo? Sweet (and if not, it’s time to get one designed!). Use it as your profile picture so you’re instantly recognizable to your audience.

2. Create share-worthy content

A big part of success in social media is spreading the word about your brand to new people. And the way to do that? Create share-worthy content.

Content is the foundation of social media. In fact, there’s a whole industry built around it: content marketing.

When it comes to social media branding, you want to establish yourself as a go-to resource for awesome content in whatever your industry you’re in.

Your content is the foundation of your social media success, and it must inspire people to click, engage and share. Visualmodo has put together a nice article explaining different ways to integrate your content marketing into your social media.

The key to successful, recognizable social media branding is to create content that will inspire your audience to share and engage. Figure out what content is going to connect best with your particular audience, publish it on the regular and watch those shares come pouring in.

Whether you decide to focus on producing video content or memes, GIFs or written posts, you need to make sure you’re branding yourself as a company who creates killer content.

3. Add ah-mazing images

Speaking of content, you can’t talk about social media branding without talking about images. In fact, some platforms—like Instagram and Pinterest—are based entirely around pictures.

Images boost engagement like crazy. Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement, and tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without. If your images aren’t a priority in your social media branding strategy, you’re going to fall flat.

When creating brand imagery for social media, be true to your self, grab your audience’s attention and look fantastic.

Now, keep in mind, your images don’t have to just be based around your product, your service or yourself (if you’re a personal brand). As long as you’re on-brand, they’re a go.

Bottom line: social media is an image-heavy place, and so in order to be successful in social media branding, you’ll need killer images.

Figure out what killer images means to your brand, and then deliver on image-centric platforms.

4. Be social

Our last tip is this: it’s called social media for a reason. If you want to find success with social media branding, you need to actually be social. When one of your followers tweets at you, tweet back! When someone leaves a question on your Facebook page, answer it! If someone comments on your LinkedIn post, comment right back!

Social media is a conversation, so it needs to go both ways. Build your brand on social media around being social and engaging with your fans. The more you engage, the more engaged they’ll be!

Get out there and get branding

Well friends, now you know everything you need to win the social media branding game
All the hard work you can trust to X2 Global Media - your best partner for building your brand!
Just drop us a message on contacts@x2globalmedia.com