Social Media Branding: The Complete Beginner’s Guide

Want to learn more about social media branding? You’re in the right place.

It goes without saying that having a strong social media presence is now a necessity for pretty much every brand—but how do you achieve that?

That’s what we’re going to find out today. 

I’ve put together a complete beginner’s guide to social media branding with everything you need to know. Let’s start with the basics…

What is social media branding?

Social media branding is the process of building and shaping your brand identity on social media. 

It’s about using social media platforms to craft a unique, consistent, memorable persona that influences how your audience perceives your business and reinforces your brand message.

The goal of social media branding is to:

• Strengthen your brand’s social presence
• Differentiate your business from the competition
• Make your brand more recognizable
• Boost brand awareness & loyalty
• Increase your reach & visibility
• Build a more loyal, engaged community

… all of which can help to support your wider marketing efforts.

How to create a social media branding strategy (14 actionable strategies)

Next, I’m going to share 14 actionable strategies to help guide your social media branding efforts. Let’s dive into it…

1. Clarify your brand identity

The first step is to clarify your brand identity. This is important as it’ll form the basis of your whole social media branding plan.

Here are some things to consider when clarifying your brand identity:

• Core values. Identify the principles and values your brand stands for. For example, that might be inclusivity, sustainability, innovation, quality, etc. These values will guide your social media messaging.
• Brand mission. Define your brand’s purpose—why you exist and what you’re aiming to achieve. This might take the form of a mission statement. 

For example, @Nike’s mission statement is ‘to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world’ and its whole social presence is built around that statement. 

• Target audience. Consider who you’re trying to reach on social media, and ensure your personality resonates with that audience. A good way to go about this is to create a buyer persona that defines your ideal customer, including their demographics and psychographics.

2. Optimize your brand’s social profiles 

It’s important to present a cohesive, unified brand image across all the social media platforms your brand is active on.

So, the next step is to ensure all your brand’s social media profiles are consistent. Here are some tips to help you do that.

• Secure branded usernames. Secure the same username/handle on every network where possible. If your preferred username is taken, use a variation that still aligns with your brand identity. A simple way to do this is by adding an adjective or descriptor, such as @MyBrandOfficial or @RealMyBrand.
• Optimize your profile imagery. Use the same profile picture (this will usually be your logo), cover art, banners, and other visual elements across all platforms to maintain brand recognition.
• Keep your bio and descriptions similar. While character limits and formatting may vary by platform, ensure your messaging stays aligned with the same key themes and brand identity.
• Secure ‘verified’ badges. Get verified on any platform where this is available—this helps to strengthen your brand’s social image and increase trust. For example, on X (Twitter), verified businesses can apply for a gold checkmark.

Bonus tip: You may want to use your social bios to promote important links (like your website, landing pages, etc.) but platforms like Instagram and TikTok only allow a single link. In this case, consider using a link in bio tool like Linktree as a workaround.

3. Establish your brand’s social voice 

Your brand’s social voice is the tone you communicate in and the personality you try to convey across all your social media posts, comments, and messages.

Establishing a consistent and distinctive brand voice helps you stand out from your competitors and get your audience’s attention. It can also help to humanize your brand and make you more relatable and memorable.

Note down some adjectives to describe the tone of voice you want to convey, e.g. friendly, warm, kind, inspiring, motivational, funny, sarcastic, professional, authoritative, etc. 

Next, expand on this with instructions on how to achieve that tone. For example, what kind of words and phrases will you use?

Grab some examples of existing social media posts in your preferred tone. These will be helpful as they’ll give your team an idea of what they’re aiming for.

Remember that your brand’s social voice should align with your brand identity. Take @Wendy’s, for example. 

Their brand archetype is that of The Jester—and they’ve built their social media tone around that persona, using sarcasm and humor to make their brand more relatable to their audience and boost engagement.

4. Develop your brand’s visual identity

Your brand should have a cohesive and recognizable visual identity. 

The goal is to ensure that whenever someone sees one of your social media posts, they immediately associate it with your brand—even without seeing your brand name.

Here’s how to create a strong visual identity:

• Use a consistent color palette. Choose a set of brand colors and apply them consistently across all your social media accounts and posts. This helps reinforce brand recognition.
• Set standards for typography. Stick to the same fonts, font pairings, sizes, and text placements in your social media visuals to create a uniform look.
• Define your design style. Whether it’s minimalist, bold, playful, or sophisticated, your design elements (icons, illustrations, and imagery) should reflect your brand personality.
• Create branded templates. Using pre-designed templates for social media posts, stories, and graphics helps maintain a professional and cohesive look while saving time.

Remember that your visual identity should align with your overall brand identity. For example, a luxury brand may use muted or dark tones for a sleek, elegant feel. A playful and youthful brand might opt for bright, vibrant colors to convey energy and fun.

@Headspace is a good example of a brand with a strong visual identity. They’re associated with bold, bright colors and the use of calm emoji faces in their graphics. This is reflected across their Instagram feed, making all of their posts instantly recognizable.

Bonus tip: Some social media scheduling tools, like Pallyy, include built-in media libraries where teams can store and access visual assets (graphics, photos, templates, etc.), making it easier to maintain a consistent aesthetic.

5. Create a social media style guide

Consistency is the key to effective social media branding. To build a strong and recognizable brand, you need to present a uniform image and voice across all social media platforms.

Maintaining this consistency can be challenging—especially if multiple people manage your brand’s social accounts. 

Without clear guidelines, different team members may take different approaches, leading to an inconsistent brand presence.

That’s where a social media style guide comes in.

A social media style guide is a document that outlines the rules, standards, and best practices for your brand’s social media communication to keep everyone on the same page.

It helps ensure that everyone on your team—from designers to writers to customer support—follows the same approach when creating posts, writing captions, or engaging with followers.

Once your style guide is in place, share it with your team to ensure that:

• Visuals created by designers align with your brand identity.
• Captions written by content creators maintain a consistent tone and voice.
• Replies, comments, and messages from your customer support team reflect your brand’s personality and values.

6. Develop a content strategy that reinforces your brand message

The content you post on social media should reinforce your brand message.

Keep this in mind when planning your social media marketing strategy by focusing on themes and topics that align with your brand identity.

Consider sharing content that showcases your brand values. For example, you might want to occasionally highlight a charitable cause that relates to your brand mission in your social posts.

Bonus tip: I’d recommend reading our comprehensive guide to building your social media strategy for more guidance on what to include in your content plan. You might also want to check out our roundup of social media post ideas.

7. Weave your brand story into your social posts

Storytelling is powerful and can help bring your brand to life—and social media posts are the perfect place to share stories with your audience.

So try to weave a narrative around your brand into the content you create for social media. 

For example, instead of just promoting a product, you could create a video that shows your customers how you came up with the idea, who worked on it, and how you brought your vision to life.

8. Stick to a consistent posting schedule

As I mentioned earlier, to establish a strong brand on social media you need to be consistent. 

And a big part of that is sticking to a consistent publishing schedule. That means sharing your posts at the same times and days each week.

Not only does this make your brand seem more professional—posting willy-nilly comes across as amateurish—but it can also help to boost your post reach and engagement as your audience will know when to expect content from you and be looking out for it.

A good social media scheduler like SocialBee can help with this. It lets you plan, create, and schedule all your posts to multiple channels ahead of time, from one unified calendar. 

Then, it auto-publishes them for you at the perfect time. You can even group similar posts into categories and set up a weekly recurring category-based schedule to save time.

9. Partner with brands and influencers that reflect your values

Partnering with other brands and influencers can be a great way to increase your reach on social media, boost credibility, and strengthen your branding efforts.

However, not all partnerships are created equal. Choosing the right partners is crucial as a misalignment can hurt, rather than help, your brand’s reputation.

Here are some tips on how to get it right:

• Find the right fit. Look for influencers that align with your brand identity. They may share the same core values, mission, and audience demographics. 
• Avoid controversial figures. It’s not usually worth the risk to partner with a polarizing figure, even if they have a huge audience, as it may negatively impact your brand image.
• Prioritize engagement over followers. A smaller influencer with a highly engaged audience is often more valuable than a celebrity influencer with millions of disengaged followers. A low engagement rate can also be a red flag that the influencer may have bought their followers.
• Provide clear brand guidelines. Make sure to give all the partners you work with all the information they need to ensure their content aligns with your social media branding. That might include your style guide and key messaging points.
• Leverage different partnership types. Collaborations can take many forms—sponsored posts, product giveaways, co-branded content, live events, etc. Choose whatever makes the most sense for your brand.
• Monitor and measure success. Track key performance metrics (e.g., engagement, reach, conversions) to ensure your partnerships are delivering value and reinforcing your brand identity. If not, rethink them.

Bonus tip: Use influencer marketing platforms like Upfluence to find influencers that align with your brand and streamline your outreach process.

10. Recruit brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadors are partners who you work with long-term.

As the name suggests, they act as ongoing ambassadors for your brand, actively promoting your product and services for months (or even years) in a much more authentic way than is typical with one-off collaborations.

Their public image becomes tied to yours, and your brand absorbs some of the trust they’ve built with their own audience, thus strengthening your social media branding.

Red Bull is a master of brand ambassador marketing. Their brand image is all about pushing the limits, so they recruit extreme sports athletes and social media content creators who embody that mentality to act as ambassadors, dubbing them ‘Red Bull Athletes’

11. Run branded hashtag campaigns & share UGC

Running branded hashtag campaigns is a great way to get your brand name in front of new audiences and boost brand awareness.

They also help to strengthen the community around your brand and provide a neat way to collect user-generated content (UGC), which you can then share as social proof.

You can set up a branded hashtag campaign using a social media contest app like SweepWidget.

An example might be a photo competition. 

Challenge your audience to share their most creative/exciting/interesting photos of themselves using your products with your branded hashtag in the caption. The photo that gets the most likes wins a prize and gets shared on your brand’s social media pages. 

12. Measure the impact of your social media branding efforts

It’s important to keep a close eye on your social media analytics. That’s the only way you’ll know whether or not all your branding efforts are paying off, and what (if anything) you need to change going forward.

Some important metrics to track here include:

• Reach & impressions. The number of people who have seen your brand’s social media posts.
• Mention volume. The number of times your brand is mentioned on social media and/or the wider web.
• Brand sentiment. The overall sentiment of your brand, often calculated based on the ratio of positive/negative mentions.
• Social share of voice. The percentage of social media conversations about your brand compared to your competitors.
• Branded search volume. The number of times your brand is searched for on social media and internet search engines like Google.

You’ll need a good social media analytics tool to keep track of these metrics. I’d recommend Social Status as it offers deeper insights than most. 

Some metrics, like mention volume and sentiment analysis, will require a social listening tool. For that, I’d recommend Brand24. 

It monitors the web for mentions of your brand name or any other keyword you want to track and extracts useful insights about them.

13. Use ads to amplify your brand’s social reach

Running ads and boosting your social media posts allows you to get your content in front of a wider audience than you’d be able to reach through organic efforts alone. You can use ad platforms like Meta Ads to set them up.

The key to success is in precise targeting. Specify targeting options to make sure your ads only get shown to the people you most want to reach—i.e. your target buyers. 

This will help to ensure you achieve the best possible return on ad spend (ROAS). You can target people based on their interests, demographics, and behaviors.

Bonus tip: Keep in mind that while paid ads are a great way to secure a quick boost for your brand, they eat into your budget fast, so you can’t rely only on ads. They work best in conjunction with a solid long-term organic social media strategy to increase your brand’s social presence.

14. Engage with your audience (to build a community around your brand)

Last but not least, remember to regularly engage with your audience. This is crucial as it helps to build a strong community around your brand.

Here are some tips on how to engage with your audience:

• Reply to comments and DMs. Take time to respond to as many comments and messages from your audience as possible on social media. This helps to foster a deeper connection with your followers and boosts brand loyalty.
• Run polls. Interactive polls are a great way to bait out audience engagements and interact directly with your audience.
• Host live streams. Going live on social media gives you an opportunity to connect directly with your audience in real time. 
• Interact with their content. Like their posts, retweet them, and share their UGC to your own socials to show your audience you care.

Final thoughts

That concludes our complete beginner’s guide to social media branding.

To recap, social media branding is the process of strengthening your brand’s image using social media and helps to support your wider marketing efforts.

Effective social media branding starts with clarifying your brand’s identity, mission, and values. 

All the content you create, messages you send, and partnerships you cultivate should reflect and reinforce that brand identity. 

Stick to the tips and strategies we’ve covered in this post and you’ll have a strong social media brand in no time.

Related reading:

• How To Use Social Proof In Your Marketing (Beginner’s Guide)
• How To Grow Your Social Media Following The Right Way
• Leading Social Media Platforms (Ranked By Monthly Active Users)

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