10 Social Media Tips to Develop Your Brand

Every company is a brand, whether you are a solo entrpeneur with a startup, or a more established company with dozens of employees. Developing your brand is important. Social media is fast becoming essential for those who want to build their brands.

As you work toward building your brand as a successful business, we offers 10 tips that can help you improve your social media strategy:

Tips #1: Be Consistent

The first thing you need to do is practice consistency in all of your social media efforts. Your social media profiles should use the same name so that customers who know you from Twitter will also be able to find you easily on Facebook, or on Reddit, or on Tumblr. Before you set up a single social media account, or start a blog, decide which name you will use for your profile, and be consistent about it. Also, use the same avatar to represent your brand on each social media profile.

Tips #2: Match Your Blog to Your Website/Brand

Blogs are among the most important social media tools out there. Make sure that your blog matches your website and your brand. Your blog should be presented in a way that leaves no doubt as to whose blog customers are visiting. The connection should be clear so that your community can easily identify you.

Tips #3: Make Your Content Useful, and Directed Toward Your Audience

In many cases, a startup will write a blog about being a startup. However, it might serve you better to write about tips that can help your audience. Consider writing about things of interest and use to members of your community. If you want to bring more traffic to your business website with the help of social media, you have to make your content useful.

Your blog posts, tweets, Facebook postings and other social media submissions should all be useful to your audience.

Tips #4: Use Keywords

While you don’t want to load social media postings (including blog posts) down with meaningless keywords, you can still optimize your content for search with the help of a few keywords. Think about the types of keywords that define your brand, and use those in your postings. Even using them on a Tumblr post, or in a description for your Digg submission, can help you draw more traffic for your website.

Check the effectiveness of different keywords, and make an effort to include a keyword or two in every post. Just make sure that it fits the content of the posting, and that it isn’t glaringly out of place.

Tips #5: Remain Upbeat and Stay Classy

Your posts should be mostly positive. You do want to show some personality, and let your community connect with you as “real.” However, you don’t want to be depressing, nor do you want to use the “humblebrag” to try and seem as if you are trying to be modest when really you expect your audience to think that you are great. Try to remain upbeat and helpful to your audience in your posts to social media resources and on your blog. You also want to remain classy. Try to avoid being rude about competitors and others on your blog. Focus on your audience and what will be useful. Your followers and community members — as well as potential customers — want positivity. Try to focus on that, and what you can do for your audience.

And, while you’re at it, don’t talk so much about yourself or your brand. You don’t want to be overbearing about your brand building.

Tips #6: Remember the Message

Next, remember the message you are conveying. The medium itself isn’t the message. Remember that your strategy shouldn’t be a particular platform. A platform like a blog, or LinkedIn, or Reddit is not a strategy itself. Social media should be considered a tool. It’s a way to distribute your message and get your brand name out there, building a reputation for yourself. Don’t consider the the platform as the end — it’s only a means to your desired end.

Tips #7: Pay Attention to Timing

As you make your posts, you should also pay attention to the timing of your posts. Consider time of day, as well as season. Post information that is useful to your clients and potential customers, depending on time of year, or cycle that makes sense to your audience. You should also track the traffic you receive when you post at different times of the day. If your audience reads blog posts first thing in the morning, posting in the middle of the afternoon won’t bring in as many readers.

The same is true of when you post to Facebook or Twitter. Focus on the most effective times to make your posts so that you get maximum exposure for your brand on the social media channels that you use.

Tips #8: Make it Easy for Visitors to Share Your Content

One of the best things you can do for your brand, with the help of social media, is make your content easy to share. Facebook is built with an easy-to-use “Like” button. However, you walso want to incorporate social sharing on your website and on your blog posts. Include buttons for the most important social sharing opportunities. Consider what your audience is likely to use. If your content fits into a niche, add a sharing button for that niche social site. You can also include buttons for Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Google +. These types of buttons make sharing quick and easy — you’ll be more likely to reach new customers and improve your brand’s reach through these sharing efforts, and utilize the networks of your community members, if you make it easy for visitors to share your content.

Tips #9: Match Your Customer Service Hours with Your Social Media Efforts

More and more companies are using social media as part of customer service efforts. The number of companies that respond to complaints on Twitter is rising. However, if you are going to make social media a cornerstone of your customer service, you need to ensure that there are specialists standing by. Match your support team’s hours to your time on social media. If you are offering tech support access via social media, you want to make sure your tech support team is available during peak hours for your customers.

Whether you offer an online chat via your website or blog, or whether you want to answer complaints and questions on Facebook or Twitter, you want to make sure that you are truly available and ready to handle concerns. You don’t have to make social media a part of your efforts, but if you do, make sure that you have the resources to adequately address any issues.

Tips #10: Engage in Conversation

Make sure you are present in your social media efforts. Answer comments on blogs, respond to comments on Facebook, engage in Google + and @ reply to followers on Twitter. If you show that you can engage your community members, you will build your brand. You will also prove accessible. You want to develop clear and reasonable guidelines for comments and other interactions, so that you avoid demeaning comments and discourage trolls. However, you should respond seriously to constructive criticism and feedback, rather than censor it. If you engage with your community members, your social media efforts can yield a loyal following — and return customers ready to sing your praises to their friends and family.

Bottom Line

Your social media strategy can go a long way toward helping you build your brand. With the right effort, in the right places, you can use social media to develop a brand image that others are happy to participate with — and that draws more customers and potential customers to your business website. And the last you can also try a business card printing strategy to optimize your social media presence.

About the Author!

Written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a china inspection service company, and who also consults for a company that works with physicians and patients to evaluate the likely effectiveness of tumorgrafting.