Over two billion people per day log on to social media. In order to make the most of your presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you must be able to successfully promote and reinforce your brand with each interaction. By developing best practices that focus on your brand, you can create a consistent social media presence that allows fans and followers to recognize you instantly, while simultaneously enhancing the customer experience.
Create Visual Consistency in Your Profiles
When customers visit your social media profiles, they expect recognize that it’s yours. Using default backgrounds or inconsistent graphic elements will confuse visitors and may lead them to believe they’ve landed on the wrong page. Be sure that each profile uses the same color pallet, incorporates the same fonts, and showcases your logo. Use cover photos and backgrounds from your existing marketing materials, or develop new images designed especially for social media. This will create a consistent experience for visitors and reinforce your brand image with each view.
Hashtag With Purpose
Everyone has experienced hashtag overload, and everyone has been put off by too many hashtags in a single post. Hashtags should be used carefully, and with purpose. It can be beneficial to create hashtags that are associated with your products and services. They can be variations of your company tagline, the name of your best selling products, or they can piggyback off of trending hashtags. When attempting to brand your own hashtags, remember that they probably won’t take off overnight, but they will help create consistency when your fans and followers view your posts.
Watermark Your Images
Images that aren’t watermarked are prime targets for copyright infringement. Watermarking images not only protects your intellectual property, but it also reinforces your brand with each view. Watermark your photos and graphics with your company logo near the corner of the image. Do not cover the image, and always leave a little room at the border so that it looks like the logo belongs in the picture.
Create Image Post Templates
Resizing an image for each social media platform can be extremely time consuming and tedious work. Create templates for the types of image posts you share on a regular basis. Those templates may be industry tips, newsworthy items, events, contests or product information. Creating a consistent template for each type of image content will not only save your team time, but it will also reinforce your brand by making those posts instantly recognizable by fans and followers. They will know just by looking at the format what the post is about.
Retweet and Like With Care
When a brand is new to a social media platform, it can go overboard with retweeting, sharing, liking, and commenting in an effort to attract new followers. Social media engagement is equally important for networking with influencers in your niche, so companies should always keep a close eye on the content they endorse. Remember that re-sharing and liking is your vote of support, so select only those posts that support your organizational values and mission, and avoid political or hot-button issues.
Provide Strong Customer Service
Ignoring customer service on social media can be the kiss of death for a brand. Customers now expect that their questions, complaints, and suggestions will be acknowledged by brands on social media. Respond to customer service posts with a prompt and polite acknowledgment of the message. Then take the conversation private through Direct Messaging, chat, or asking the customer for their telephone number or email address. This allows you to manage the issue behind the scenes, while showing the customer (and everyone watching) that your brand responds to customer issues quickly and effectively.
Develop Social Media Best Practices
If more than one person will have access to social media profiles, it will be necessary to create a best practice guide to ensure that your brand message remains consistent with each post. These best practices should include a library of approved logos and fonts, suggested and approved hashtags, maximum posts per day per platform, acceptable terminology, topics to avoid, industry influencers to retweet, etc. In order to promote your brand effectively on social media, you must be able to control your brand messaging effectively.
When developing any marketing strategy, it’s important that each and every component promotes and reinforces your brand. When you view social media through this lens, it will help you strengthen customer relationships and convert casual followers into loyal fans.
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