Think your brand is above Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Think again.

Billions of people connect on social media every day. Smart businesses have embraced promoting their brands on social media. Because they understand how essential it is to their success.

Face-to-face customer experiences are becoming less common, while consumers have adopted social media as a shopping outlet.

Marketing your brand identity on social media is one of the best things you can do for your brand’s visibility in the marketplace. Especially if you’re trying to build a new business. But established companies can benefit too if they’ve never ventured into social media’s deep waters.

Your brand’s identity can still benefit from the old school days of print media, television advertising, and newsletters. But embracing social media instead of shunning it can boost your brand identity to new heights.

Keep reading to learn how you can use social media to your brand’s benefit.

What Exactly Is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is the visual representation of your product or service, such as your logo, colors, shapes, visuals, fonts, etc.

The purpose of creating your brand identity is to make sure that when your customers see it, they know exactly who you are. Think Nike’s “swoosh,” a can of Coca-Cola, or even the Facebook logo. These symbols are so recognizable, the average person would have a hard time not knowing exactly what they represent.

You want your brand identity to stand out, so your customers don’t even need to think about your product or service. They just know.

However, brand identity on social media goes beyond visuals. You also need to establish your voice and tone.

How to Build Your Brand on Social Media

So how do you go about creating your brand identity on social media?

The first thing you should know is that it takes a lot of hard work and time — especially if you’re a new company just starting out. Be consistent in your visual branding. Consumers like visuals. It’s just that simple. If you’re going to be using different social media platforms, you want your branding imagery to be essentially the same across all platforms.

And speaking of different platforms, your marketing needs multiple personalities.

While consistency in your visual branding is important, you need to be flexible about your target audience and what they want to hear. The tone of your advertising, blog posts, etc., need to speak to your audience. For example, younger people like TikTok and Instagram, while the older folks are likely to use Facebook.

Your marketing needs to be flexible across multiple platforms so that your message is reaching its intended customers. When targeting a younger audience, sarcasm, snark, and memes may be the best way to go. Your older audience may be happier with straightforward, informative content.

Why Social Media Is So Important

Using social media to promote your brand identity allows you to reach millions and millions of potential customers. And all they have to do is click.

Social media makes it easy for customers to find your company, products, and services. The keyword is easy. Most consumers are a busy (or lazy) bunch, and the easier you make it for them to find you, the better.

You can use social media to show your product or service expertise by producing content that engages your audience. In other words, you can promote your trustworthiness on social media.

You can also run circles around your competition with clever marketing campaigns and following internet trends to stay up to date.

Targeting Your Audience

As mentioned above, it is of utmost importance to know who you are trying to talk (sell) to.

Social media can reach as far and wide as you desire. Do you just want to target consumers in your town? In your state? Nationally? Or even globally?

You can do it with social media. You are in complete control of your message, who you want to receive it, and how you want it to be received.

Which Platform is Best for Your Brand?

Social media has come a long way from the days of the long-dead MySpace. Even Facebook is an aging platform.

These days, you have a lot more options. And you should use more than one because the target audiences are diverse.

Here is a brief breakdown of the most popular platforms:

Facebook — users click to share messages, videos, memes, articles, etc.

Twitter — similar to Facebook but with a character limit so embrace the opportunity to be more informal or more concise depending on your message

Instagram — primarily visual for sharing pictures and videos

LinkedIn — geared primarily towards professionals growing their business

Pinterest — users pick their interests by category and compile collections

TikTok — known as “Karaoke for the digital age,” this platform is for sharing music videos

The social media platform(s) you decide to use depends entirely on your brand’s goals. Using more than one gives you a better chance of reaching a larger audience.

And some platforms have features built-in so that you can post your content simultaneously on, for example, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Track Your Social Media Engagement

Once you have put all of the work into marketing campaigns to increase your brand identity, you need to see what’s working and what’s not.

There are a variety of tools available to evaluate your social media engagement. These help you figure out what people are responding to and what they are not.

This is an invaluable opportunity to tweak your campaigns, or scrap them entirely and start over.

But some patience is required. Brand identity success does not happen overnight. Be sure to keep your expectations in check. Realistically, plan on 12 to 18 months before you have a clear vision of your successes and failures.

Take Control of Your Brand Identity

So, let’s circle back to the beginning. Social media is incredibly important in promoting your company’s products or services. But it starts with creating your brand identity.

And that’s where we come in. EliteStart offers services from logo design, web design and creation, and marketing and brand consulting.

Contact us today to see how we can get you started on this very exciting journey.