Although the banners can differ across networks, it’s important to retain a recognisable brand colour palette even if the design or content changes. Utilise features like Facebook’s Video Cover Photos to add dynamic elements to your branding. Remember, branding your social media presence is an ongoing process that requires consistency, forward-thinking, and regular updates.

Actions:

• Use a social media audit tool to analyse all your accounts.
• Ensure logos, banners, intro/straplines and #hashtags align with your brand and conduct regular audits.
• Maintain a consistent posting schedule and ensure your content aligns with your established branding.

Once you have established a consistent visual brand across your social media accounts, it’s time to take it a step further. This means incorporating the same colours and fonts into your images, graphics, and videos. When someone visits your Instagram page, they should immediately recognise your brand’s filter or distinctive colour scheme. Similarly, the text fonts used in your videos should align with those used in your blog post and featured images.

Over time, your audience will begin to associate your brand with consistent visuals, even without seeing your logo or handle. This type of brand recognition should be your ultimate goal in social media branding.

Each story should maintain a consistent colour palette and design approach, reinforcing your brand’s identity by consistently using recognisable visual elements. This will help your followers easily identify your brand’s unique approach to visuals.

Actions:

• Develop a visual brand guide that includes fonts, their usage and colours. This guide should serve as a reference for your team.
• Create graphic templates for specific types of announcements, ensuring consistent fonts, colours and designs.
• Produce photos and videos that align with your brand’s aesthetic and colour choices, allowing them to seamlessly flow together.

It’s important to understand that your marketing personas may vary across different social media networks. Each social media network attracts a different demographic, and using the same content across all platforms may not work effectively. To address this, it’s best to create multiple personas tailored to each network you use.

Start by mapping your company’s customer base to the various social media networks you’re active on. For instance, your Twitter account might target millennial parents while your Instagram account focuses on small business owners. Once you have established personas for each network this will help you generate content ideas that resonate with specific audiences and allow you to adjust your voice accordingly.

Actions:

• Develop multiple marketing personas and assign them to the relevant social media networks.
• Analyse the demographics of your networks and conduct audience research if necessary.
• Create content tailored to each persona to effectively engage your target audience.

After visual elements, the next crucial aspect of branding your social media posts is the captions and related copy. Company social media accounts often have a distinct personality, whether it’s chatty, informative, or any other defined tone. If you already have a brand tone of voice established, extending it to social media and tailoring it to each platform is highly recommended.

A comprehensive tone of voice guide should include details like brand persona, straplines, personality traits, and vocabulary. Even the smallest details, such as whether you refer to your audience as “clients” or “customers,” contribute to maintaining consistent writing. If multiple team members manage your accounts, having a guide to reference ensures a cohesive brand voice.

Actions:

• Fully develop and document your tone of voice guide. Consider using social media listening to validate writing style decisions.
• Audit your existing social media posts to identify areas for improvement in tone of voice consistency.
• Share the guide with your team and provide any necessary training. Encourage everyone, including customer support, to write posts using the tone of voice guide.

If your company is large or offers diverse products or services, it may be beneficial to create multiple social media accounts. Having separate accounts allows you to focus your branding and cater to specific audiences, and deliver relevant content.

Consider the following approaches:

1. Multiple accounts per location: Utilise Facebook’s location feature to create individual accounts for each location.
2. Separate marketing and customer service Twitter accounts: If you receive a high volume of inquiries, having dedicated accounts can streamline communication.
3. Accounts by audience: Nike has separate accounts for different sports they cater for.
4. Mascot accounts: Some popular sports teams have dedicated accounts for their mascots.
5. Department-specific accounts: Higher education institutions often maintain accounts specific to certain departments.

Actions:

• Evaluate your offerings and identify areas where dividing focus into multiple accounts would be an advantage.
• Apply your branding to ensure consistency across all accounts. Consider adjusting the tone or style to match each account’s target audience.
• Use services like Sprout or Hootsuite to manage multiple accounts under one ownership.
• Measure the impact of your branding efforts: To gauge the success of your branding on social media, pay close attention to engagement, mentions, and sharing. Conduct regular surveys to assess brand recognition among your audience, understand which audiences you’re effectively reaching, and ensure that the way your brand is perceived aligns with your goals.
• Use tools like Sprout or Hootsuite to generate group reports and analyse overall trends across your networks. By customising these reports with date ranges, you can track the performance of your branding efforts since their inception.