What is the Impact of Branding in the Age of Social Media?

Traditionally, you may know branding as adding your logo and company colors to as many surfaces and platforms as possible.

It’s also the process of communicating your company values and creating a positive reputation in order to spark trust in customers and others in your industry.

These activities are still important in the age of social media but the method changes because people spend so much time browsing these online platforms.

Now, there’s less chance of someone looking at a flyer, because social media is the place where people direct their attention.

Your goal should be to connect with them there and share your information—logo, values, products and more—in a way that will prevent them from simply scrolling past.

Unfortunately, with so much content available online, it’s difficult to get noticed.

Let’s be clear and say that doing branding which incorporates social media is essential in the current environment.

Utilized correctly, it can help with:

• Improving brand recognition
• Help you obtain customer feedback to help improve campaigns, services and products
• With proper engagements online, contacts can turn into loyal customers
• Build loyalty when your interactions prove you care about your audience

Therefore, actions like learning to create a social media logo for your brand will eventually pay off but you need to intentionally incorporate the following tips.

Instead of assuming that simply being present on social media will attract your audience, you need to be much more aggressive and strategic about the process.

These facts and approaches will help create effective branding campaigns for social media.

1. Know the Obstacles

To create the best branding campaign, you need to know what you’re up against.

A major obstacle is that social media users often do everything in their power to avoid advertisements.

Social media platforms also empower users to choose what they want to see, so simply posting content doesn’t guarantee it will be viewed.

Consumers find ads irritating, and you don’t want your brand associated with that feeling.

This is why organic engagement, such as responding to complaints or joining online conversations, often become more effective branding methods.

Simply make sure your profile contains your striking logo and company information.

2. Think Culture

One of the outcomes of social media, which experts didn’t predict, is that people started creating their own cultures online.

Being connected online empowered previously isolated individuals to join up and form crowd-cultures.

For example, people with specific diets, environmental views or niche interests can now easily find likeminded individuals.

In addition, technology empower these groups to create their own content, such as videos shot with mobile phones.

How do you use this as an opportunity, rather than an obstacle?

Take up the challenge to join in with spreading the ideas these groups find important, rather than only focusing on your own brand message.

Partnering with them, such as supporting a certain cause, will force them to take notice, make your content popular with that niche and ensure sharing.

This will improve your brand exposure and draw followers from others who are part of these cultures.

3. Services vs. Products

Understand that what you offer will determine how you need to brand yourself.

Sharing about products may be easier than promoting services that people can’t visualize or view in store.

This requires your branding campaign to focus even more on promoting your values such as innovation or quality service.

4. Remember Demographics

Even though social media is popular and used by all ages, you can’t assume your content will work the same with all demographics.

The impact of branding will be more pronounced with the younger generation, so for other groups your branding strategy will look different than only prioritizing online content.

Always research the group you want to reach, so you know what medium is most likely to reach them.

5. Pick the Right Social Media Platform

Different types of people also use different social media platforms.

Simply focusing on Facebook—since it’s popular and has features focused on businesses—can cause you to miss out on a large group of people preferring Instagram or LinkedIn.

The latter is especially important for reaching business professionals.

In business it’s dangerous to assume anything, so don’t think you know exactly how to reach your audience yet.

You don’t want to invest money in digital marketing only to realize after months that people still aren’t taking notice of your brand.

The answer is to respect your audience’s preferences, understand their needs and rather partner with them in sharing content that’s relevant to them, instead of simply wanting to talk about your brand.

Yes, it calls for a rethink of branding campaigns, but the outcome will be worth it.

Hope this article helps you out! If you want more advice for expanding your reach, getting leads, & growing your business — let me know in the comment section below!

If you’d like help implementing any of these tactics into your business – checkout our affordable seo services and web design services – or simply drop us a line!

We’d love if you left a comment/question for us to answer below!

We aren’t perfect! What branding questions did we leave unanswered in our article above?