Utilizing social media is a great way to interact and communicate with your ideal audience. Also, sharing consistent content provides an opportunity to introduce and humanize your brand. 

Your social media strategy should include more than just a generic recurrence of standard posts. If it is repetitive and generic, your efforts to market your brand likely won’t get you anywhere. How can you tailor your social media strategy to represent your unique brand? Keep reading for our top tips to do just that. 

Introduce Your Account with an Engaging Bio

Your bio is your first opportunity to introduce your brand and set the stage for what your followers can expect from you. Setting an eye-catching, exciting photo for your profile image is step one. Whether it be your brand logo or a team photo, it should be something that quickly identifies your brand to the viewers that come across it. 

Next, you want to ensure that your bio description introduces who your brand is, what you do, and what your customers can expect from their interactions with you. Your bio shouldn’t be more than a sentence or two. Any longer and your audience will likely glaze right over it. It should also include a call to action or a link to find more information. Where can they find answers to their questions or more information about your brand? Make it very clear to them! 

Although your bio information should provide viewers with helpful information directly relevant to your brand, it should also reflect your unique brand voice. Is your brand funny? Relatable? Luxurious? Serious? Educational? Imagine that your brand is a mouthpiece that you’re speaking through when posting on your business accounts. 

Everything you post and share should closely reflect the uniqueness of your voice. Check out this article for more information on brand voice, including its meaning and how to incorporate it across your social media strategy. 

Engage With Your Audience

Engagement is critical in establishing a strong social media strategy. Social media platforms are the perfect mutual playing ground for interacting with your audience and understanding their needs and challenges. 

While most social media users generally expect businesses and brands to respond to messages, DMs, or tags, some certainly facilitate doing so better than others. Engagement should be timely and consistent and should reflect your brand voice and uniqueness. 

Let’s chat about a hypothetical scenario. You’re on Instagram and come across a realtor account that posted a property you’re interested in. You decide to send them a direct message asking for more details about the property and if it’s still available. Scenario 1: you receive an automated response linking you to their website for more information. Scenario 2: you receive a message greeting you by name with a friendly personalized response inquiring about what you’re looking for and answering your questions directly. Which would you prefer as a consumer? 

Although neither of these options is necessarily negative, most people would likely rather receive the response in Scenario 2. Personalized engagement introduces who you are as a brand and immediately gives viewers a positive impression that you’re helpful, personable, and unique. The same goes even for replying to comments or commenting on others’ posts or content!

Make Your Content Conversational

Posting and sharing content on your social media accounts is about more than posting just for the sake of posting. Ideally, you want your content to elicit conversation and draw engagement from the users that are viewing it. One way to do this is by including calls to action. 

A call to action may include asking users to:

• Click a link (either in the account bio or in the caption)

• Follow the account

• Send a message

• Call the business

• Post a comment

• Tag a friend

These are just a few of the potential calls to action (CTA) that a brand might choose to share. CTAs are a primary driver of ongoing engagement across the platform but also provide another level of humanization across the account and allow your brand to interact with your audience.  

Use Video Content

Video is KING! Especially over the past year, video content has become the primary focus of social media platforms and search engines. Since viewers are more likely to stop and watch video content than read or view a stagnant image post, social media platforms have begun sharing video content more prominently across their platforms. This initiative started when TikTok established the growth of short-form video content. Since then, this strategy has grown across nearly all social media platforms and search engines alike. 

According to a recent study by HubSpot, “94% of marketers agree that videos have helped increase user understanding of their product or service.” This further supports the claim that users are more likely to view your content if it includes video than a static image or simple text. 

Not only does video content tend to perform better on an organic basis, but it also serves as an excellent opportunity to interact with your audience personally. For example, video can be used instead of blog content – rather than typing out content to be hosted on your site, jump in front of the camera and verbally explain the topic to your audience. 

Beyond explanatory uses, video can also be used more casually to interact and chat with your audience. Think Instagram live, Reels, TikTok content, Instagram stories, etc. – all great ways to connect your personality to your brand. 

Incorporate Unique Photos of Your Team

People love to see people on social media. Whether it’s your Aunt Suzy asking for pictures from your latest vacation or a previous coworker sharing a new job opportunity – sharing photos of people that users can recognize is sure to create a relatable aspect to your brand. 

In the same way, your family and friends get excited to see your photos; your customers will be excited to see you and your team. They grow to recognize you, whether in person or over Zoom meetings. When they see you and your team members on social media in your content, they’re more likely to stop, look at and engage with the content. 

Beyond that, using real photos is yet another way to humanize your brand. Using stock images introduces your potential customers to iStock, not your brand. In some cases, stock images can be helpful and relevant; however, using unique photos of your team is another way to set yourself apart. 

Focus on Your Customers

Think about why you’re using social media – to build an audience, drive engagement, and introduce new users to your brand. All these goals focus on your customers … so your content should too. The content that you share, captions that you write, and messages that you send should all be tailored to the needs and wishes of your customer. 

Identifying brand personas for your ideal customer is vital. You should be able to identify who your hypothetical ideal audience is, from their demographics to preferences and most visited channels. These details should consider every time you interact or share something on your social media platforms. Satisfying your customer's needs and wishes is the end all be all of your business’s goals. 

Social media allows your brand to interact with your audience and customers. Establishing a unique strategy for your business and brand is critical to set yourself apart and allowing your audience to understand what they can expect from you. For more tips on establishing a unique social media strategy, reach out to Caroline at caroline@ccsocialmediamarketing.com or schedule a call.