Brand Building 101: The Right Way to Use Social Media to Promote Your Business

In the grand scheme of entrepreneurship, creating a business is the easy part. You come up with a concept, a name, build your team, maybe you patent something, and voila! You’re now technically a business.

However, there’s one crucial step still to come – unveiling your business to the world. In truth, many businesses will fail at this stage by never properly getting off the ground.

Fortunately, we live in the age of social media. These days, the majority of small businesses use both social media (62%) and a website (61%) to market themselves, according to research from Clutch.co. That’s because there are many ways to use the tools available to help develop and grow your brand.

Here we will explore just a few of the means at our disposal.

  1. Basic branding fundamentals

It won’t matter how good your social media campaign is if you don’t have the basic branding fundamentals locked in.

Make sure that your logo is consistent across your platforms, decide on a color palette, a biography, and more. Essentially, make sure there is a common thread across all of your public-facing messaging that allows people to recognize your brand.

Good branding needs to take into consideration the needs and wants of your customers and prospective customers. As consumers begin to identify with you, they will begin to remember you and recommend your products or services. 

Remember, successful branding should celebrate and promote your strengths. What are you good at? What do you believe in? These types of questions will help you solidify your image.

  1. Make use of SEO

For the layman, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.”

Essentially, SEO is used to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of the site within a search engine.

According to a 2018 Hubspot survey, 61 percent of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.

There are now entire university courses dedicated to search engine optimization, so delving into exactly how to use this tool would take more space than we have here. But one of the best places to begin is Google’s own Analytics Academy

  1. Engage with your audience and be consistent

Providing valuable and shareable content is one of the best ways to stay top-of-mind with your customers. (It can also have the added bonus of helping your SEO.)

But keep in mind: you’ll create a stronger reputation for yourself if you focus on creating strong content, rather than just churning out videos and blog posts that don’t land with people.

Every piece of content you share should support your overall brand image. Try and figure out what type of content is most likely to gain attention on your social networks. Images or memes may resonate better with certain types of audiences, and blog posts may work better for others.

Take a look at this company’s LinkedIn profile: The firm provides frequent posts that offer insightful information about the industry, interesting facts, and company news. What’s important here is the consistency. It helps their audience feel engaged. By providing reliably updated content, their visitors know they can return and see something new.

Building your brand takes time. The best way to do that is by being consistent. 

No matter what platform you’re posting too, whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or more, the look and tone should remain relatively the same. Try to remain consistent with color, style, and language usage. 

  1. Find the right influencers

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, social media influencers can have a big impact on your bottom line. 

As social marketing expert Josh Forti explains to Entrepeneur.com, “If you can get your product or service publicly vouched [for] by a trusted authority in your niche, your sales can skyrocket overnight.”

Indeed, more than 50 percent of Internet users say they follow some sort of celebrity or influencer account on social media. A further 22 percent of marketers surveyed already consider influencer marketing the most cost-effective way of obtaining new customers.

So, don’t shy away from partnering with influencers on social media. It can be a very effective way of growing your brand and keeping people engaged with your company.

The Takeaway

Entrepreneurship is a finicky beast. It’s common knowledge that most businesses fail within the first five years. 

A big reason for that is that many new companies simply don’t know how to get the word out that they exist. But by developing your brand, engaging with your customers, and taking advantage of the tools that are available today, you will be able to create something successful and long-lasting.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.