Is Your Social Media Branding In Order?
I like to read a lot about branding. It’s one of the topics that I like to take a little bit of time to think about and when carried out correctly it is incredibly powerful. I only drink one type of Cola because Coca Cola have instilled their brand values deep in to my consciousness and I lust after an iPad not because I know anything about the specs or think it is a superior product to what is on the market but because I love the Apple brand and as I have said in the past they could take a shit in a white bag and I’d probably buy it. Getting your branding correct will help you charge more money for your product or services and bring more business through the door so investing some time money and resources in to these areas is very important. Getting your branding correct across your various social media profiles is also incredibly important and something that we wanted to look at today…
Be Consistent
Chances are you are going to have a fair few profiles online and you want to make sure you keep these as uniform as possible. You might have a more playful Twitter account than your Linkedin profile but you want to make sure that people know where they are with you at all times. Not everybody has the resources to come up with a unified brand strategy but just have a look at our various social media profiles and you can see how our profiles all follow one central theme even though we produce different content on each one. Nothing complicated here we simply use one photo that we love and use that as a central theme…
Website
We wanted to keep the style of the site very informal and personal and make the blog the main feature so as we had plenty of fresh content and a reason to keep people coming back. Not a conventional agency website but we hoped to create something a little bit more fun.
Our Facebook page is really just somewhere that we can have a little bit of fun and post pictures of what we eat, ask people questions and post the odd video. Nothing to serious and just a simple way of keeping people engaged.
YouTube
We use this for video diaries and to do short video tutorials. We don’t use it that often and only have about 50 videos on there but we have had 1 sales lead and lots of new readers on the blog thanks to YouTube so important for it to be on brand.
We like to keep most of our personal stuff on our own Twitter feeds and use the company account to share our blog posts and respond to queries. Lots of leads and business queries come through this channel so important to be on brand.
Focus On The Details
Small things matter when you are taking about your brand. There is no point having an expensive flashy website that cost you thousands when your Twitter profile features an out of focus picture of you that has nothing to do with your brand. People will be interacting with your brand on so many fronts now that it is crucial that it is consistent wherever people find you online. Look at the gravatrar we use on the left, that is the little picture that appears when you leave a comment online and is a tiny detail but if you are out there leaving comments and interacting with others that is also a representation of your brand and it is essential that you are consistent at all times. The details really matter.
Find Your Identity Early
Large companies and organizations will have teams of people dedicated to their brand and keeping it uniform across as many channels as possible and making sure everybody within the company know about the brand values. For a small company you are not going to have as many resources or time to dedicate to your brand but for myself and Lauren here at Simply Zesty it was as simple as sitting down for an hour over a long coffee and deciding that we wanted to be fun, edgy and keep things creative. We loved the photos that Phil took so much for our website that we decided to use those as a central theme to everything that we do. There wasn’t any strategic planning or huge decision making process involved so just find something within your company that you love and that typifies what you do (please try and avoid a logo as there are too many people out there doing that) and run with it. Try being abstract as I find that works really well even if it will take you longer to build up the brand recognition.
Personal Branding
Gary Vaynerchuk sells more wine because of his personal branding
With all the tools at our disposal these days personal branding is something than can be achieved very quickly online and it can be an important tool in helping to shape your brand. It won’t apply to bigger businesses but for small businesses looking to make an impression creating a brand around the personality of some of the key members on the team can be a great way to leverage social media. The key is turning that person in to an advocate of what they do and establishing themselves as an expert in their given field. There are some challenges in this method though namely that it only really works best when it is the owner of the business rather than an employee as you don’t want to build a brand around a personality who could leave the company in a couple of months. The upside is that if you do find the right person them it can really help drive your brand forward as people relate to a personality online much more than to a brand.
Is There A Payoff?
All this branding is going to be a bit of hard work and it does take time. Branding is the reason that I will pay 20 Euros for a fancy hamburger when the same product is available elsewhere at half the price, it’s the reason why the only type of smoothie I will ever drink is an Innocent smoothie and the reason why I always head straight for the can of Coke in the fridge. If you do it correctly online you will have more customers and those customers will be willing to pay you more for your services so that has to be something that is worth doing. When you take in to consideration that everything is so transparent online these days and consumers can get a quick snapshot of everything you do by looking you up on Google in a couple of seconds it is massively important that you get your branding eight from day 1. It really is that important.
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