by Michael Jones | May 18, 2020
You’re not living in the era of your grandparents’ Life Magazines where advertising was a one-way street. Welcome to the digital age, where social media is king. When it comes to branding your company on social media, it might seem simple, but that’s just the surface level.
If you’re only tossing up sale/promotional posts or posting just because you think you have to, you’re not captivating your audience. The key characteristic of effective social media posts is that they have an underlying meaning. Your social media audience needs to be engaging with your content, through likes, comments, and shares. To do that, your posts need to be community-driven.
Advertising has become a two-way communication vehicle. You talk to your audience, and your audience talks to you! That’s a great thing for your business because it helps you better understand your target audience and revise your tactics. But if you don’t take the time to understand them, it can be detrimental to the growth of your brand.
One of the best ways to grow your social media audience and reach more people on platforms is by getting them to engage with your posts. Facebook, for example, has made drastic changes over the past few years to focus their app more heavily on family, friends, and community, making it harder for business pages to have their posts show up in users’ timelines. This is the case even for users that are following your page.
Resulting from this change, social media algorithms prioritize business posts that have a lot of engagement in terms of likes, comments, and shares, more frequently pushing them onto users’ timelines!
A rule of thumb in connecting to your current and prospective followers is remembering that the majority of people in our world like to talk about themselves, so get them to talk about themselves! Force-feeding posts about a sale or promotion posts about products with no community-driven value will rank your page lower in social media algorithms. That’s not to say never make sales or promotional posts, but make the effort to ask questions and come up with ideas to make users want to engage with your post.
A sense of community is powerful. Being professional in the way you brand your company on social media is important but needs to be done in a way that makes people realize there’s an actual person that they are talking to behind the business’s page and its posts. Followers will engage with your page more if they know there isn’t a robot behind the keyboard. Be real!
Social Media branding is an important part of getting your brand front and center. With millions of people using platforms every day, branding your business effectively requires strategy and research. Without content your audience wants to engage with, you’re losing money, time, and effort.
