For a small business, social media can be beneficial in many ways, but if your brand isn’t cohesive and strategically showcased, your presence on Facebook and Instagram may do more harm than good, and jeopardize your professional credibility. 

 

So, in today’s blog post, we will cover how you can optimize your social media profile, your content, and your communication, so you can start fresh and develop a brand that earns trust, builds relationships, and ultimately increases your sales. 

 

 

Gathering Your Assets

First, gather all of your marketing assets!

 

Before you log into any social networks, you need to ensure you have everything you need to develop your brand online. This means gathering:

 

• Logos and all of their variations
• Colour codes for digital and print media
• Fonts for titles, headers, and body text

 

After gathering all of the visual pieces of your brand, you need to gather each text piece too. This includes your company’s biography, mission statement, and slogans you routinely use. To begin developing your brand through social media, start by organizing every bit of branding you have, both visual and text, into an official document. In other words, for a fresh start, make sure that you set up a proper “Brand Identity”. This will allow you to avoid using outdated content, and keep each social media profile cohesive. 

 

Now that you have gathered all of this information and given yourself a solid foundation to launch from, you can begin to properly establish your brand so your social media presence earns trust.

 

 

 

 

Establishing Your Social Media Profiles

Now that you have both the visual and text elements that make up your brand organized and ready to go, you can bring your brand to your social media profiles!

 

While most platforms require a variation of the same components, a profile picture, banner, and a bio, you should still take your time to understand the criteria of each one as a simple mistake can damage your brand image. For example, the banner you have on Facebook, may not work as well on LinkedIn. Or, the desktop version of your profile may not translate to mobile.

 

If your goal is brand development, you don’t want to embarrass your company by uploading a profile picture that ends up pixelated!

 

Since we’ve gathered and organized all of your branding assets, the next steps will be quite self-explanatory. Simply go through the profile editing/creation process of each social media platform, and use your “Brand Identity” to ensure there aren’t any mismatches from one social media platform to the next.

 

Customer trust is huge for any business, and by taking the time to properly set up your social media profiles, you can be sure each one best represents your brand.

 

 

 

 

Creating Content

After properly branding your social media profiles, you can start to create and post content to truly showcase the character and values behind your brand.

 

While establishing your social media profiles is a crucial step to develop your brand online, the content you regularly post will be a much larger factor in the overall reputation you build for your business. This is because a brand is much more than a logo or slogan, but rather, the perspective and opinions that the public has formed about a business. 

 

So, when you create social media content, you need to ensure that it is an accurate reflection of your business’s values, and the quality of the products or services you provide. To do this, you need to develop a tone of voice to guide your writing, as well as a content strategy that highlights how you do business. 

 

To develop a tone of voice, consider how you want your business to be perceived and the market position of your competition. Let’s say you run a friendly and approachable physiotherapy clinic, while your competition has an approach filled with more scientific jargon. In this case, social media content written in an enthusiastic and casual tone would better align with your clinic, AND each post would work to develop your friendly and approachable brand image.

 

As for your content strategy, you need to define a few more components of your business, your content pillars, your selling points, and your target personas. Here’s a brief breakdown:

 

• Content pillars: Primary topics that create the basis of your social content
• Selling points: Features, advantages, and benefits of the products or services you provide
• Target personas: A breakdown of your target audience, segmented into groups based on similar personalities and characteristics 

 

For a more in-depth strategy guide, check out our blog post – How to Develop a Social Media Strategy for Your Small Business

 

After defining these key components you can then create content that is not only consistent with the main offerings of your business, but you will also be able to tailor said content to better resonate with your specific audience segments to generate more sales. 

 

 

 

 

Engaging With Your Followers

The final piece to developing your brand online, is the social part of social media, engagement!

 

When it comes to building your brand awareness, having a cohesive set of profiles and strategic content can only get you so far… If you want to maximize the benefit that your business gets from utilizing social media, you need to engage with your followers. But, unlike engagement on your personal account, to grow your business account, even your engagement needs to be thoughtfully planned. So, just as you set up specific parameters to create effective branded content, you will also need to set up specific parameters to ensure your interactions on social media are also “on brand”.

 

For the vast majority of businesses, you can simply follow the tone of voice you’ve crafted for your content strategy. However, unlike content creation, engagement entails back-and-forth conversations, and these conversations often revolve around customer service. To help you prepare for feedback that is either overwhelmingly positive or negative, organize a flow chart of responses in advance. This will help you quickly respond to customer praise and complaints in a manner that not only handles the situation at hand, but does so using your brand’s tone of voice. 

 

In addition to helping you simply handle customer praise and complaints, you can also build and strengthen the relationships that you have with your customers through social media engagement. Now, this doesn’t mean that your social media engagement strategy will lead you to becoming besties with your customers, but, by having consistent positive interactions with them, you can make your business one worth trusting. On the other hand, consistent negative interactions can ruin your relationship and the trust that you’ve built with your customers. 

 

For example, let’s say that a customer comments on one of your posts about shipping delays. If your response genuinely handles their complaint, and leaves them feeling satisfied with a solution, they are much more likely to order from you again despite the shipping issues. However, if your response is rude, leaving the customer hopeless, they will probably never order from you again!

 

Although the foundation of your brand online is built on cohesive social media profiles and strategic content, if you truly want to make an impact, you need to engage with your customers one-on-one. 

 

 

 

 

In conclusion, social media can be an incredibly powerful asset for any small business, but only if it’s done right! But, by following our tips on organizing your assets, creating cohesive profiles, posting strategic content, and engaging with your audience, you can be sure that your combined efforts ultimately build a powerful brand that exudes reliability and trust, earning you more sales. 

 

However, if you’re looking for help from social media experts, contact us! We would love to tell you more about our Social Media Management services.