Social media – a boon or a bain? We’ve heard these debates endless times. What has social media done to our generation? How is it going to affect people’s lives? Has it changed the world of marketing? I don’t know about the first few questions, but I’m going to discuss the last question – Has social media changed the world of marketing?
To state the obvious: Yes, it has. In this playbook, we’ll be discussing the following things:
- Benefits of social media
- Social media platforms
- Branding process on social media
- Top social media marketing strategies
Like many other people, I’m guilty of making impulsive purchases via Instagram and stocking up my room with cute and quirky products.
Well, this happened because they figured I’m someone who likes cute and quirky products, and they kept advertising it to me till I finally made the purchase.
Who am I kidding?
The advertising continued even after spending half my wealth on those products (exaggeration, but you get my point.)
That’s the power of social media marketing.
You can market your products to people who are most likely to buy your products, increasing the chances of gaining more sales. Before discussing how you can get started with social media branding, you must decide which platform you wish to market on.
Benefits Of Social Media
When done correctly, social media marketing can be quite advantageous to your company. Here are some of the reasons for this:
- It boosts brand recognition
- Increased conversion rates
- Search engine ranks have improved
- Cost-effectiveness
- Boosted top-of-funnel traffic
List Of Social Media Networks
The following social media platform are some of the most popular social media networks that can act like best friends for your marketing strategy
Facebook is the most popular social media platform, with about 2.27 billion monthly active users.
Facebook allows you to target your users based on different personal parameters like age, location, gender, relationship status, level of education, interests, job title, purchasing behaviour, device usage, and other characteristics using the Facebook Ads Manager.
Instagram is a visual medium that allows you to show off your company’s personality. It is not a text-heavy site, and links within postings are not permitted.
The good news is that you have access to several tools that you may utilise to enhance your audience’s creative experience.
If you want to reach out to your customers through photographs and videos, Instagram is the greatest platform for you. You can use Instagram to share photographs of your items in action and encourage your followers to do the same.
Whether you use Twitter for business or personal reasons, or both, a sound profile is the key to success.
Twitter stands out from other social media platforms regarding professionalism, purpose and functionality. It lets you be found easily on the web.
LinkedIn can be the professional face of your business. It is ideal for B2B owners to find other businesses on LinkedIn.
It can be a place for you to post updates about your company, your employees and your work life.
WhatsApp is a messaging software owned by Facebook that allows users to interact with their contacts and businesses.
The WhatsApp Business app allows your company to create a profile, respond to customer messages, and automate some communications to help you keep organised.
WhatsApp, being one of the most popular social media networks, also allows businesses to develop product and service catalogues.
YouTube
YouTube is the ideal tool for gaining critical attention, allowing others to witness your abilities firsthand, and building a loyal fan following throughout the internet.
YouTube is comparable to blogging. As a result, the entire experience is known as vlogging.
Text and images are the focus of blogging, but scripting, recording, editing, and high-quality uploads are the focus of YouTube. People nowadays prefer to watch videos rather than read blog content.
The branding process on social media can be divided into five steps.
Step 1: Define your niche
Building your personal brand without choosing your niche means communicating without a purpose. It would help if you focused on attaining the highest form of knowledge on the topic of your choice.
So, pick the one that appeals to you—the one you are passionate about and most interested in. However, more factors come into play.
For example, you might be passionate about worms, and you might have more knowledge on this subject when compared to others.
But there might not be enough search volume on search engines for worms related keywords. There might not be enough scope for this subject on digital.
Hence, you might want to re-look and re-describe it as entomology on the whole. It might then have a larger impact and search volume than the average study of worms.
However, at times, you might want to build your personal brand with topics that are not very popular as there is less competition and because you don’t want to sacrifice your passion. With time, you will gain concept clarity.
Your niche largely depends on 3 factors.
- Passion: how passionate are you about a particular subject/topic?
Make a list of subjects or topics that you can talk about every single day and never get tired of (a minimum of 10 topics that you are passionate about). This can be related to your personal or professional lifestyle.
- Skills/knowledge: how much knowledge do you possess in the subject/topic you are passionate about?
Make a list of topics in which you are more skilled and knowledgeable than the average person. It should be something you would love and feel equipped to teach.
They can/cannot be related to your passion. (A minimum of 5 skills required). This can be related to your career, business or something through which you would like to create an identity.
Now look for an overlap in the above list. That should help you find your topic.
- Marketing opportunity/profitability: what is the market opportunity for the topic that you have picked?
The 3rd largest factor in deciding your niche is a market opportunity. Some niches attract the mass while others reach out to an interested few, as there is not much demand. It always works in combination:
- Not so popular niche (example: B2B IT, HR, Marketing Communication) = Less Competitive.
- Very popular niche (example: fashion, gadgets, music, travel, making money online) = Super Competitive.
Many pick a niche based on market opportunities. People figure out their niche on the basis of its earning potential.
The best way to evaluate the monetization ability of a niche is by evaluating if the niche you derived will help you:
- Earn through affiliate marketing. (Are there enough affiliate opportunities online when you google ‘your niche affiliate programs’? If you see enough programs, it’s a good niche to be in.)
- Can your niche help you fetch your dream job and position?
- Can your niche get you a speaking/training assignment; are there enough opportunities?
- Can your niche make you an influencer in the domain; is there enough demand in the market?
- Are there enough players and success case studies in your niche?
Somewhere, someone is searching for you, and he/she will discover you as you regularly talk about your niche across all your social media channels.
Once you’ve considered these key factors, you need to:
1) Finalise your niche
Answer these questions before you finalise your niche. This is to ensure that you are picking a subject in which you want to become a pro.
- What’s the purpose of your personal branding journey?
- What knowledge value can you add for people to start recognising you?
- Why should someone who doesn’t know you follow you?
If you can answer the above questions, you will be able to give your social media presence a new dimension.
2) Follow the 1-9-90 rule
The internet revolves around the rule of 1–9–90.
- Only 1% of internet users are publishers. They publish original content on the internet.
- 9% of internet users are consumers/conversationalists; they react, share and respond to the 1% posts.
- The remaining 90% of the audience on the internet are lurkers. They don’t publish or react. They enjoy the show between the publishers and the conversationalists.
Now that you have read about it evaluate where you stand in the pyramid.
Step 2: Understanding social media channels, personal branding styles and setting goals
As mentioned before, picking up the right social media channel for your personal branding is essential and understanding the value offering of social media channels is all the more crucial.
1. Where Do You See Yourself?
The most successful people on the internet are the ones who publish content. They are the trendsetters, and they influence the industry through the knowledge they share.
People generally avoid social publishing channels like YouTube, podcasts, blogs and Quora as it involves a lot of effort to maintain them. But this is the core of your personal branding. It is the base from where everything starts.
- Social publishing channels can be listed on search engines when people try to search for your offerings. They enter your territory, and if your content inspires them, they subscribe to your blog or YouTube channel.
- These platforms mature with time. The more you contribute, the more you win. The highest recognition comes from your core contribution to your social publishing.
- Social networking platforms are amazing for instant gratification. You are possibly scrolling through them every day and are using this platform as your source of entertainment.
- Social networking sites are a marketplace for you to promote your published content on a blog and YouTube. However, there are some who solely focus on social networking sites and don’t create other bases. There is no harm in following social networking as the only strategic platform.
- The algorithms of social networking sites keep shifting as per their commercial objectives. While the number of followers and the number of connections is one of the biggest credibility building factors, social networking sites can kill the organic reach to your very own followers.
- You don’t own the audience here and people discover you only through organic searches/shares, paid promotions or hashtags.
- Visual-based social networking sites are very similar to the above category. They are purely a game affair of great visuals. If you have great images, you have higher chances of growing your follower base on these platforms.
In the chapters later, we shall discuss some critical tools in each category and how to make the best use of them to build a personal brand with relevant case studies.
2. Goal Setting For Your Personal Branding
Goal setting on social media to build your personal brand largely depends on how much time you can dedicate to it.
Some people have used social media extensively to establish themselves. They treat blogging, YouTubing and Instagramming as their business. This has become a full-time profession for many.
Step 3: Polishing Your Social Media Presence
Creating a mere presence on social media is not enough. Your social profile should create an impression and convey your personal brand.
Booking a common username across all social media channels is a healthy social media personal branding practice.
Please log on to namechk.com and type the username you want. This site will check its availability on all platforms at once.
Step 4: Content Creation And Promotion
Creating content and promoting the same is equally important. Some mistakes people make while using social media channels to build their personal brands are:
- Not communicating the right things on the right platforms.
- Following an irregular posting schedule.
- Creating great content but not promoting it.
- Not cross-promoting content (poor dissemination of content).
- Not repurposing content (a blog can be converted into a video, a video into tweets and more).
Step 5: Nurturing Subscribers
When people love your content, they tend to look at your profile. When they find your profile interesting, they tend to subscribe to your updates.
Some influencers in the digital space offer email subscriptions, while others focus on growing Instagram followers or YouTube subscribers. It depends on what your focus is.
Consistently posting content, writing regular emails and going live on different platforms are some great ways to nurture subscribers.
1. Give Your Brand A Voice
It’s a good idea to spell out some parameters for your team if your business hasn’t identified its voice yet. Consider why your brand exists, what it stands for, and how you’d like to characterise it.
2. Research Your Audience
Only 55% of marketers use social analytics to understand their target audience better, presenting significant potential for both leaders and practitioners.
Much of the information you’ll need to shape your social media marketing plan is already available. All you have to do is know where to look.
TIP: Each platform caters to a separate group of people, so make sure you choose a platform where your audience is.
3. Use Automation
Instead of becoming bogged down with repetitive, mundane work, tools and automation allow you to focus on the most important tasks.
Use tools to make your job easier and more productive on a daily basis, and eliminate or automate wasteful processes whenever possible.
Social media listening tools, for example, are handy for planning and developing content that your target audience would enjoy. Chatbots may be used to reply to consumer inquiries swiftly.
A scheduler is also used by most brands to post content when and where they want on social media networks.
4. Short-Form Video
Video is the most beneficial content type for attaining social goals, according to 54% of marketers, and with good reason.
With the introduction of TikTok and Instagram Reels, social video is exploding. Because of their high interaction rate, both long-form and short-form works continue to dominate the social sphere across all platforms.
5. Measure Your Results
Without hard data, social media managers can’t justify their worth or maximise their efforts. Use a social marketing platform that allows you to track and improve your social media campaigns.
This operates in the same way that search, email, and other well-known digital channels have been monitored and optimised for years.
Make it a goal to quantify the influence of social media on your business. This can help you gain executive support for resources such as technology tools and team members, as well as demonstrate that you’re adding value.
Conclusion
The rise and death of social media channels are common. Only a handful survive and make it to the top. Usually, they are unique or used by a huge user base.
Creating a presence on all social media channels that are popular is important, but how active you become on them is your choice.
Some have a great organic reach, and some need paid attention.
One of the biggest mistakes that I made initially was to give all my platforms equal attention. Undivided attention is not a good idea; ideally, focusing on one or two platforms is a good deal and most recommended.
Let’s say you focus on growing your YouTube subscribers; ultimately, you should use other social media channels to route people to your YouTube channel and consistently post content and converse with the audience to engage with them on a day-to-day basis or during the schedules defined by you.
Happy marketing!
