Keeping an organisation’s marketing strategy fresh and engaging often means staying up to date with the latest trends across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. However, the feverish pace at which digital trends develop can make it difficult to stay on-brand across every social media site you use.
On the one hand, it is important that you tailor your marketing strategy to cater to specific platforms. On the other, however, it is important that strategies across all of the platforms you use combine to make a consistent whole. The following tips are just a few ways you can combat this problem; and stay true to your brand across social media:
1. Always keep your audience in mind
Knowing how specific audiences will respond to campaigns and posts is vital to staying on-brand on social media. For example, your Facebook audience is likely to be very different to your LinkedIn audience; while your Twitter audience may be very different from your Instagram audience. The trick to not losing your brand’s core identity across platforms, then, is to carefully construct messages that cater for the subset of your main audience that is likely to use a given social media platform. This is a delicate art and may take a little getting used to at first, but the results can be fantastic once you get the hang of it.
2. Maintain a consistent aesthetic
This is a much simpler tip than the one above, and perhaps the most obvious. Brand unity is best achieved by using a set of simple colours and logos across platforms, as well as setting all profile pictures as the same core brand logo. This makes your brand immediately recognisable online; a key factor when it comes to gaining followers and, by extension, new customers.
3. Get used to using a dashboard
Dashboards such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social streamline the process of updating social media accounts and can help you gain a more coherent overview of what your brand is putting out there at any given time. What’s more, many of them come with some great tools that help with scheduling posts, which can be very useful if you have customers in different time zones.
4. And finally… be confident in your brand’s identity
It can be all too easy to try to exploit certain current events or holidays on social media channels. However, this may not always be advantageous. For example, while Halloween may be just around the corner; it may not be a particularly relevant holiday to post about for a data analysis firm or a property developer. Be confident enough in your company’s voice to know what topics will engage your customers.
