How to Establish a Brand Identity on Your Socials

You’ve probably heard it before: branding is everything. Your brand identity is how your customers recognize and remember you, affecting everything from your credibility to your market share to your word of mouth. But thankfully, you don’t have to hire a massive ad agency to help you manage your branding. You have just as strong of a branding tool right in your pocket: social media.

Social media offers you unprecedented control over your brand identity by giving you a direct line to your audience of potential and current customers. That’s why, as a small business, it’s essential to take advantage of this powerful tool to establish your brand identity.

In this article, we’ll give you all the information you’ll need and a handful of easy, actionable tips so you can develop and strengthen your brand identity on social.

Let’s dive in. 

What Is a Brand Identity?

Your brand identity is the collection of the various elements your business uses to convey an idea of who you are, what you stand for, and what makes you stand out from the crowd. 

Brand identity involves several elements, including:

• Your business name
• Your logo
• The visuals associated with your brand on your marketing materials, in your physical location, on your website, on your social media, and so on
• Your tone of voice
• Your values
• How your brand makes people feel 

All these elements create a general impression and reputation that people will associate with your brand. 

Why Your Brand Identity Matters

The truth is that you can ignore branding entirely, and you’ll still have a brand identity. It might not align with how you want people to view your brand. That’s why it’s so important to be mindful of branding and put in a proactive effort to build a brand identity that reflects how you want to be seen and who you believe yourself to be. If you do an excellent job of it, you can expect many essential benefits, such as:

• Improving brand recognition. Having a consistent brand identity helps people recognize your business, making it more likely they’ll buy from you.
• Creating trust and credibility. By being consistent with your branding, your audience will always know what to expect, helping them trust you more. And this is important, as 46 percent of consumers say they would pay more to purchase from brands they can trust.
• Creating customer loyalty. By being trustworthy and consistent, you’ll be able to build customer loyalty, with customers returning again and again because they know they’ll receive the same level of service and quality they’ve come to expect from you. 
• Improving brand recognition. Having a consistent brand identity helps people recognize your business, making it more likely they’ll buy from you.
• Differentiating you from your competitors. When your audience knows who you are, they’ll also know what makes you different from (and better than!) the competitors in your industry.
• Making you memorable. It’s much easier to remember a brand with a consistent identity than one that keeps changing. And you don’t want your audience to forget you, right? 

How to Establish Your Brand Identity on Social Media

Now that you know all the advantages of having a strong and consistent brand identity, here are some suggestions for using social media to establish yours.

Create a Branding Guideline

You can’t present a consistent brand identity on social media if you don’t have an unmistakable idea of what that brand identity is. So as a first step, create a document outlining your brand identity. This will include your logo, fonts, colors, tone of voice, and so on. Make this document available to all your employees – especially those involved with marketing – so they can use it as a guide when creating social media content.

Here are some examples of brand identity guideline documents to inspire you:

• Starbucks brand expression guide
• Spotify design guidelines
• Slack brand guidelines  

Include Your Logo

An essential tip for establishing brand identity on social media is to always include your logo in everything you post. This way, anybody looking at your content – even if it is reposted by somebody else in a different location – will know that it came from you. And by showing your followers your logo again and again, you’ll help them to remember it – and your business.

Promo tip: Promo’s video maker makes it easy to include your business’s logo in all your social media videos by allowing you to quickly upload it and drag and drop it into the place you want it to appear on your video. 

Post Consistently

When it comes to branding, consistency is everything. In fact, consistently presenting your brand can increase your revenue by 33 percent! That’s why it’s essential to create a regular social media posting schedule to ensure you’re regularly getting your brand in front of your audience’s eyes. 

Promo tip: A content calendar is an invaluable tool in the effort to post consistently on social media, helping you keep track of past, current, and future content to make sure you’re hitting your posting goals and keeping your accounts fresh with relevant, timely content. Use Promo’s social media calendar for all your content needs, 365 days of the year!

Use Videos

As the most popular type of online content, social videos can significantly help your brand reach more people. 

When it comes to video content, consistent branding requires following these best practices:

• Use a consistent editing style in all of your videos. Avoid cutting one video super fast-paced and short while all your others are slow and detailed.  
• Use the same intro and outro format in all of your videos
• Use consistent formatting for all your titles on social media platforms where you can include a video title, such as Facebook and YouTube. Avoid writing one title in ALL CAPS and another in Sentence Case. 
• Always keep your visual elements consistent, including transitions, colors, logos, and fonts. This is more important than you might think: just using a signature color can increase brand recognition by up to 80 percent.

Create Templates

To make it easier for yourself to make and post content with the same branding, consider creating templates for your social media accounts. You can make templates for every element of your social media content, including:

• Titles
• Descriptions
• Hashtags
• Images
• Videos

Templates will save you significant time, making it easier to post more content on social media. They will also ensure that you never slip up and accidentally forget to include your logo or use the wrong font. 

Promo tip: You can create a video in Promo’s video maker to use as a master template that you can duplicate for consistent branding in your social media videos. From the master template, you can easily change whatever elements you want for each new video, such as text, aspect ratio, footage, and more. 

Make Your Own Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to participate in conversations on social media, but you can also use them to start your own discussions! If you haven’t already, consider creating one or more branded hashtags for your business. These can be as simple as #YourBusinessName or, more specifically, referencing a specific social media campaign or event. For example, if you run a contest on your Instagram where your followers can win a gift card for Hanukkah, you can create the hashtag #YourBusinessNameHanukkahGiveaway. 

There are two essential benefits of branded hashtags:

1. They spread your business name to get it in front of more eyes for improved brand recognition
2. They make it easier to find user-generated content, or content your audience creates on their own related to your business, that you can respond to or repost to engage with your audience and keep your accounts full of fresh content. 

Show Us Who You Are 

Brand identity is easy to overlook, but once you know how important it is and how to adjust your social media posting habits to optimize for it, you’ll easily benefit from the power of social media for small business branding.