Mastering Social Media Branding:

Strategies that Drive Results

More consumers now judge a company by its social media presence than by its website. In fact, over 75% of people – including 88% of Gen Z – say that a brand’s social media profile plays a bigger role in building trust and credibility.

In many cases, social media serves as the first touchpoint for customers interacting with your brand. So, how can you make each impression – whether it’s the first, fifth, or even the thirtieth – truly impactful?

Outstanding social media branding is essential.

Building a strong and authentic brand can set your company apart from competitors, expand your reach, and inspire customers to take action.

In this article, I’ll cover what goes into building a successful social media brand, why enhancing it is essential, and five best practices to help you get started today.

Key Takeaways

Your social media brand represents your company’s image, identity, and messaging across all social platforms. While it doesn’t need to mirror your website’s branding exactly, it should maintain consistency across all social channels.
Social media branding enables companies to strengthen brand perception, expand their audience reach, and boost engagement levels.
Establishing a consistent visual identity and tone of voice is a crucial element of any effective social media branding strategy.
You need to post regularly on a variety of platforms. Use a social media content calendar to enforce a schedule and ensure every post meets business objectives.
Develop well-defined customer profiles to gain a deep understanding of your audience. The better you know who you’re speaking to, the easier it becomes to create content that resonates with their interests.
Collaborating with influencers allows you to tap into established audiences. For cost-effective results, consider working with micro-influencers who offer high engagement and targeted reach.
Leverage native and third-party social media monitoring tools to effectively track and analyze your performance.

What is Social Media Branding And Why Is It Important?

Social media branding is both an art and a science, shaping your business identity across platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Your social media brand embodies your company’s persona—its visual style, tone, and messaging. It should set you apart from competitors and give your target audience a compelling reason to follow and engage with you.

Establish your social media brand by sharing engaging content and fostering meaningful connections with your target audience. Once your brand is well-defined, your followers will recognize your content instantly, even without your name attached.

Consider brands like Wendy’s, Red Bull, and Nike.

These brands are super-successful on social media. They have incredibly strong brand personas to the point where I bet you could instantly pick out one of their post.

Social media branding isn’t the be-all and end-all, however. It’s an extension of your company’s wider digital marketing strategy and one part of a social media marketing strategy. A strong social media brand can support other marketing efforts like SEO or paid ad campaigns by increasing touchpoints and nudging customers further down the funnel with every informative or funny post.

On the other hand, weak social media branding can cause confusion and apathy. If you don’t convey a consistent image, come across as self-promotional, or fail to provide value, potential customers won’t follow you. It’s as simple as that.

Key Benefits of Effective Social Media Branding

Whether you’re a startup or a well-established company, there are plenty of reasons to invest in social media brand marketing.

Build or improve your reputation: A strong social media brand helps users understand what your company stands for—even if they’ve never heard of it before. Effective branding is also a powerful way to change user perceptions. Side note: I’ll show you exactly how my agency leveraged this benefit at the end of this article.
Reach a wider audience: Posting consistently engaging and informative content will help users discover your brand. If your branding is really strong, you’ll also stick in the minds of your target audience in the same way the three brands I mentioned above do.
Increase engagement: A strong brand also increases engagement with your existing audience. When you post something meaningful, users are much more likely to interact with your brand, share your content, and click through to your site.

Best Practices for Social Media Branding

Looking for advice on how to build a brand on social media? Dive into my five best practices below.

Have A Consistent Presence

Your brand should look and feel the same across every social media platform.

The more you reinforce your brand image, the more easily followers will recognize your content in the future. A consistent brand also builds trust, makes it easy for audience members to follow you across different platforms, and gives them the confidence to buy from you.

It starts with visuals.

Use your website’s color palettes, logos, and images to ensure the visual branding of all your social profiles is very similar, if not the same. Make sure to use the same colors and images in your posts, too.

For example, my agency maintains a consistent image on LinkedIn even though we can only show our logo and a thin banner image. We manage to work in our brand colors, strapline, and some of our most prominent awards.

You don’t just want your profiles to look the same, though. You want them to sound the same, too.

A well-defined social media brand will have a recognizable voice and use the same tone and style in every post.

If you already have brand and style guidelines for your website, you can use them for social media, too. But don’t worry if your social voice differs slightly from the voice you use on your corporate website. It’s okay — even encouraged — to be more informal and friendly on social media.

If you’re creating a social media branding guide from scratch, then include the following elements to make it easy for anyone to pick it up and start posting:

Here’s a great example from Discord:

While a consistent presence is key, be careful of spreading yourself too thin. I recommend prioritizing the platforms most important for your business. B2B brands, for example, should probably prioritize LinkedIn. A B2C brand with a Gen Z focus, on the other hand, should prioritize TikTok.

Provide Relevant Content On Socials

Excessive self-promotion is not appropriate in a social media branding strategy. Instead, your posts should offer value to followers.

That could be advice, entertainment, or something else entirely. Whatever you post, the key is to be original and relevant. Try to say things others aren’t saying. Going against perceived common wisdom can be particularly powerful, for example.

High-quality, engaging, and informative content will position your brand as an industry authority. Users are more likely to engage with great content too, which means more shares, clicks, and followers.

One-off posts aren’t enough to build a brand on social media—even if you go viral. You need to be posting consistently. Not so much that you flood your followers’ feeds, mind you, but enough to stay relevant.

If you’re wondering exactly how often you should be posting on each channel, the social media team at Hootsuite did the research and came up with the following:

When it comes to creating a consistent posting schedule, a social media content calendar can be a savior. Spending time to establish what you’ll post and when will make posting relevant content way less stressful. It will also help you see the bigger picture and make sure all of your posts are contributing towards a marketing or business objective.

Build Out Customer Profiles

To build meaningful connections with your audience, you need to know who they are and what they care about.

The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to create content that jives with their interests and helps them achieve their goals.

I recommend building out detailed customer profiles for each channel that include details like:

Here’s an example of what a finished customer profile should look like courtesy of Adobe:

Engaging with your community can help, too. The more you speak to followers in your comments and look up their profiles, the easier it will be to form a strong perception of the kind of people you should be talking to.

Partner With Relevant Influencers

There’s nothing wrong with leveraging other people’s great branding to grow your social media presence. That’s what influencer marketing is all about!

Social media influencers hold sway over large followings—people who could eventually follow your business. Influencers are seen as more authentic than brands, so partnering with them can help some of that authenticity and credibility rub off on you.

Don’t just work with anyone, however. You only want to spend time and effort with influencers who align with your company values and can deliver results.

I recommend making sure influencers:

Fit your niche: There’s no point courting a famous pop culture influencer if you sell B2B project management software. Productivity gurus are a much better choice.
Meet your budget: If you can afford an influencer with a million followers, brilliant. Most brands, however, are better off seeking micro-influencers. These are people with highly-engaged audiences of between 1,000 and 50,000 people.
Have a history of promoting similar brands: You don’t want to be a guinea pig, especially if it’s your first time working with an influencer.

Take author and entrepreneur Janell Roberts, for example.

Her relatively small (11.6K followers on Instagram) but highly engaged audience makes her the perfect partner for a company like House of CB, which sells luxury womenswear.

Have A Measurement Plan

You know the saying by now: what gets measured gets managed!

That’s why my final best practice is to establish a measurement plan so you can track your success and tweak your strategy.

Signing up for business accounts with each platform can help in this regard. They tend to have platform-specific analytics that you can’t always get elsewhere. Here’s TikTok’s business center dashboard, for example:

I recommend paying for a third-party analytics tool, too. I have reviewed some of the best social media analytics tools here, but Hootsuite and Buffer are good options for centralizing social media analytics, automating the posting process, and uncovering insights you can use to grow.

Use these platforms to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your goals and measure your success.

For example, tracking follower count will be vital if I want to grow my audience. If building relationships is more important, however, I’ll want to prioritize engagement metrics like comments and likes.

These platforms aren’t just a great way to track your overall success, you can also use insights to improve your strategy. You may find one type of post does far better than others. Or that posting at a certain time drives the most engagement. Either way, you can use this information to tweak your content calendar and drive better results.

FAQs

What is social media branding?

Social media branding is a marketing strategy where businesses distribute content across social media platforms to improve brand recognition and build meaningful connections with their target audience.

Why is social media branding important?

Social media branding is important because it helps build and reinforce your online reputation. Consistent posting helps customers form a perception of your brand and keeps you in front of mind.

How can I implement social media branding strategies?

Consistency is key when it comes to implementing any social media branding strategy. Whether you’re creating informative posts on LinkedIn that help your target audience achieve their goals or entertaining followers on Instagram with dog videos, you want to be posting regularly. Maintaining a consistent brand image is also important. Every post should mirror your style guidelines and be written in the same tone.

What are the key elements of a successful social media branding plan?

A strong visual identity, a consistent tone of voice, and incredibly engaging content are the cornerstones of a successful social media branding plan. Rather than promote your brand, you should be doing everything possible to deliver value to your followers. It doesn’t matter if you’re offering advice or providing entertainment, don’t half-ass it!

How can I monitor and improve my social media branding results?

There are two sets of tools you can use to monitor and improve your social media branding efforts. The first is the native monitoring tools every social channel has. These provide accurate insights on things like engagement and follower growth. The second is third-party analytics tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. These platforms centralize all your social media branding data, allowing you to monitor everything in one place and compare the growth of one platform against another.

Conclusion

Now it’s over to you. Social media branding is a great way to achieve key objectives, improve your reach, and connect with your target audience.

While you may be eager to achieve those business goals, don’t be afraid of letting your personality show. Social media isn’t the same as your blog. A friendly, approachable social media brand will resonate way more with users than a stuffy corporate one.

So get your brand identity in order, draw up guidelines that spell out your tone of voice, and create a content calendar that ensures you consistently post on-brand, relevant messages across several social accounts.

But there isn’t a single best branding style. Track your results, and don’t be afraid to mix up your strategy.