Social media marketing is one of the most modern approaches to marketing.
It’s an excellent way to build brand awareness, increase brand awareness, and an effective way to reach your target audience. But if you want to get the most from your social media, you need to create outstanding profiles that get noticed for all the right reasons. Social media has proven to be an effective marketing tool, with 92% of marketers seeing results from their social media marketing efforts.
You already know the world of business is a fast one- with many factors involved in keeping up with the competition and standing out to your target customer. Your social media accounts are a great way to represent your brand and reach your target customers where they are already- enjoying social networking. While social media has proven to be an effective marketing tool, more and more brands are realizing its marketing potential.
As such, the competition is getting tougher than ever, demanding you to use new strategies and up your game in order to cut through the noise.
Here are some simple ways to vamp up your business social media profiles and create an impressive representation of your brand.
1. Fill Out All The Info
The first very simple step you can take to improve your social media profile is to fill out all of the information it asks of you. It sounds like a simple and obvious step but it’s one that goes unnoticed by many companies. They get quick or lazy in the creation process and they don’t fill in all the blanks. You might think that your brand is large enough that people know you already or that they will recognize you when they land on your profile. However, you might not know that there are other reasons for filling out all the info.
When you fill in all the spaces in your social media profile, it makes your profile more available in search results, meaning more people will find you. This is also an opportunity to tell people more about your brand, include calls to action, invite them to your website or use this to post your mission statement, bio and more. Take advantage of all the space and opportunities given to you.
Think of your social media profiles like your storefront. Many of the people who come across your profiles on social media will never have heard about your business. This means that the first impression they will have of your business is based on your profile, and do you want it to be a positive or a negative one?
Just like you wouldn’t leave your brick and mortar storefront incomplete and unfinished, you shouldn’t leave your social media profiles incomplete either.
Make sure you’ll in all relevant information so people who come across your profile instantly know who you are and what you do. By completing your profiles, you instantly make them more appealing and welcoming, and thus dramatically increase the chances of having people become curious and stick around.
2. Get A Professional Profile Photo
Marketers have a short time frame to grab the attention of an audience. It has been reported that humans now have an attention span that is shorter than that of a goldfish’s, and it is especially short on social media where we are constantly bombarded with information and thus have to be selective in the content we consume.
Photos do speak volumes on the social scale. Visual marketing creates a resonance that often will cut through the noise. Yet, it takes a brand or business persona to get through the social clutter.
If you want your social media profile to stand out from the many others in the average social media user’s stream, then a professional photo might be just the way to do it. Using a professional photo of a person who leads the company is often better and more personable than using your company logo- but again, it depends on the business, the social networking platform and your branding.
Images that resonate and compel your readers to take your call of action also help promote a sharing effect. Images can tell a brand story, share news and even link to a creative promotion or giveaways which will invite participation. The key is to target these images towards an audience that cares.
If you run a company, a brand, you should use your logo. By using your business logo as your profile photo, you make yourself instantly recognizable, and allow yourself to build your brand awareness. When using your logo, you ensure that your audience comes in contact with it as often as possible, and when building brand awareness, it demands repetition after repetition. Just think of how many times you’ve seen Coca-Cola’s logo to have it etched into your head.
If you are looking to build your personal brand, or if you are your brand, on the other hand, you’re best off using a face shot of yourself as a profile photo. This makes sense because, with your personal brand, you are your own brand. You’re not relying on a trademark and logo.
Oh, and remember, when adding your profile photo, make sure that it is a high-quality image in the right format. There’s nothing more unattractive than a profile photo that’s blurry and of low quality. Especially not considering the fact that your social media profile is often the first thing people encounter when they come across your business on social media.
3. Create A Social Media Editorial Calendar
Often times, there is mixed feedback from reporting companies on some social media companies marketing efforts. Some say their clients are getting great traffic and conversions from social media while others don’t see the desired results. There are a couple of good reasons for this discrepancy. However, the big takeaway here is that when online marketing for business you must be consistent and one way of ensuring consistency is by using a social media editorial calendar.
A social media editorial calendar will help you stay organized on what you are posting and when. This is an essential tool of more than one member of your business team will be using the social media accounts. However, even if you’re managing it all yourself, you can benefit from the editorial calendar. It will help you to brainstorm new ideas, post content your readers will enjoy and stay consistent with your posting. This will immediately launch your profile and create a more professional appearance even to those just briefly glancing through.
Adding social media marketing to your overall marketing strategy, developing a plan in your editorial calendar to build your reputation and your community presence, and handing that system to implement for your business team are all important for success.
With so many social media platforms out there, managing a social media strategy can easily become overwhelming, and thus having a social media editorial calendar helps you stay more organized and well-prepared.
4. Post Original Content
There’s nothing wrong with occasionally sharing other people’s content, as long as you do it correctly and have a good strategy for it. You want to give useful content that makes people want to come back again and also to share with their friends, and if you can’t do that with user-generated content, it’s best to stay away from it.
On the other hand, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of sharing other people’s content – if done correctly. Especially as a brand. By sharing your audience and your customers’ content on social media, also known as user-generated content (UGC), you show your audience that you value them, that you appreciate them, and most importantly, you include them on your journey. The result is a more engaged and loyal audience.
The best of all with UGC is that it has proven to be incredibly powerful for driving sales and marketing benefits.
In fact, user-generated content interactions while shopping increases the conversion rate to 9.6%, 84% of consumers say they trust peer recommendations above all other sources of advertising.
If you do share UGC, make sure you attribute properly and do not infringe upon the rights of others. This includes all types of content- articles, quotes, photos and more.
The best social media strategies aren’t those that solely leverage UGC or those that solely leverage professionally created content. The best social media content strategies are those that leverage both.
5. Enlist The Help Of A Professional
Sometimes we all need a little help and a social media/ branding specialist can help you to get your accounts started correctly, pinpoint problems in your accounts or profiles, set you up with an editorial calendar and more. A professional could come on board full time to help you or it could be a once-in-awhile opportunity to get your accounts evaluated for efficiency.
A expert in social media strategies will manage the development, management and organization efforts of your campaign. Social media platforms are now an integral part of any up to date marketing strategy. Small business owners are usually trained to be lawyers, accountants,dentists, and hairdressers, and not marketing consultants. Many small business owners are not, and shouldn’t be, expected to have the know how of running an marketing campaign through social media.
The problem is that many business owners tend to either underestimate how much work social media marketing actually means, or how important it is to use social media properly (and have a proper strategy for it).
What does this mean? It means that while social media has proven to be able to help marketers achieve amazing marketing results, it’s important to not forget that social media is just a marketing tool. And like all tools, social media is only helpful when you know how to use it properly.
As such, if you know that you don’t have the expertise needed to have a successful social media presence, it’s crucial that you take help from other people and seek help from experts.
Don’t make the mistake of believing that all it takes to drive results with social media is uploading a few posts and then waiting for the results to roll on. Again, if you don’t know how to use the tool of social media for your marketing, find someone who do, because that will be the only way you’ll be able to drive any results if you yourself don’t know how, and have no interest in learning it either.
6. Always Represent Your Brand
If you want your social media profile to stand out from the rest, keep consistent with your brand. Everything you post, share and say should be keeping with your brand’s values and ideals. This doesn’t mean you cannot post things just for fun but your profile at-a-glance should reflect what your brand is all about.
As you can see, there are many different ways to improve your business social media profiles and portray the best impression of your brand. You can get more people to engage with your accounts when you take the time to build them properly and post content that stands out in the stream. This brings me to my next point.
7. Develop And Define Your Brand Voice And Visual Theme
As a business, you’re looking to portray your brand in a different way in order to build a personality and an image, which ultimately affects how people will remember you. For example, if you think of Skittles, you think of rainbows and sunshine, and happiness, and positivity. This is because these are the traits that Skittles have worked to have you associate with their brand. As such, you need to think of how you want people to perceive and think of your brand, and then work actively to improve that, and ensure that all your efforts are aligned toward that specific goal.
The first step is to define your brand voice and brand personality. Your brand voice is, at its core how you speak. Are you going to use slang, are you going to be conservative, are you going to use a boring language, or are you going to be very edgy and daring? Your brand voice should reflect your target audience and the way they speak.
Your goal is obviously to make your target audience resonate with your brand, and this demands you to speak to them in the same language as they speak in. It’s obviously a lot easier to resonate with a teenager if you’re a teenager yourself than it is with an 80-year old.
By developing and defining your brand voice, you can ensure that it is consistent through all of your social media efforts, and also no matter who it is that is managing your social media – whether you’re communicating in a comment, in your profligate messages, or in your post captions. If your brand voice isn’t consistent, there’s also a risk that you create a disconnect between you and your audience and make it harder for them to resonate with you.
The other thing you want to pay attention to is your visual theme. On most social media platforms, you share visual content partly or all the time. And the thing is, your audience is following you for a reason, and this is the reason why they’re continuing to follow you and continuing to engage with your posts. As such, you also want to pay attention to your visual theme. What does this mean? Well, your visual theme is essentially the theme of which the visual pieces of content you share on social media have.
It is important that the visual content you share on social media is consistent and aligned with each other, because this will help people recognise your page and content much quicker, and you’ll also be able o distinctively separate yourself form your competitors. Now, does this mean you have to post the same kind of visual content? Of course not! The motives of your visual content doesn’t have to be the same, but just the style of your visuals. Whether that is by using the same filter, editing them in the same way, etc, is completely up to you.
Also, having defined these two things will make it much easier for you to know what you should post and what you should say.
8. Make Your Profiles Consistent Across All Platforms
This cannot be emphasised enough, yet still, so many businesses are missing out on this fact.
As you now know, you shouldn’t just rely on one social media platform. You should be using multiple of them as part of your social media strategy. But when setting your profiles up, it’s crucial that they are instantly recognisable. Not only each platform one by one, but as a unity.
First off, you want to begin by securing the same username on all your social media platforms.
This one is a no-brainer, but the reason you want to do so is to make it easier to be discovered. For example, if my username is Josh on Instagram, then chances are that people will search for Josh if they also decide to look me up on Twitter. But if my name is Josh1234529 on Twitter, chances are, they won’t find me, or at least struggle.
Secondly, you want to pay attention to your profile pictures. Now, you already know that you should either have your logo or a face shot depending on what type of business you are, but it is also important that you use the same profile picture across platforms. Again, this is important for discoverability as it will enable people to instantly recognise your profile – no matter which social platform they use.
Additionally, having the same profile picture on your social platforms, especially a logo, will allow you to continuingly build your brand awareness and logo-awareness – no matter which platform your audience is on.
Takeaways
Your social media profile is often the first impression someone has of your brand.
Your business social media profiles should be professional but unique.
Update your accounts regularly with unique, quality content to show an impressive social media profile from quick glance.
What tips do you have for vamping up your social media profiles? What are some examples you have seen of profiles that really stood out and impressed you?
[Main image: Don English (1901-1964); Paramount Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]
Aly Chiman, the creative mind behind AlyChi Designs, is a freelancer and brand strategist. He enjoys frequenting coffee shops and going on camping trips. He writes about marketing, innovation, and entrepreneurship on his blog here