“It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed — that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed.”
Bill Moggridge –Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits (public library)
Branding goes beyond visuals and graphics. Branding is a message delivered all across the platforms we present.
Branding is also about the relationship we are creating with our audience. Social Media for instance is the perfect place to create close communication, such as liking and following a particular brand. Brand positioning, brand recognition and relationship building happens with every status update and resource we share online. (tweet this!)
The humanization of brands through Social Media brings products, services and customers closer than ever.
Brand Voice
One of the easiest ways to be consistent across any media is to define a brand voice, define the tone you’ll use to talk to your audience as well as how you want to be perceived to those reading about you.
Defining a brand voice will allow your followers and prospective customers to connect and stay interested in you. Brands are no longer corporate beings that only speak in business jargon to everyone. People want to know more and feel that you’re talking directly to them, that every message has been crafted especially for them.
Social Media is about connection. To connect with your audience they need to know who you are, what you can offer them, how you can solve their problems, and what motivates you to offer your product/service .
Be Relevant
This doesn’t mean that you only need to create updates that are 100% business related. Your followers don’t want to see a full timeline of sales pitches, they want to consume what you have to offer and be drawn by your knowledge and/or expertise in a particular matter.
Share what you think they would love to read. Share what you know they’re looking for. Share a solution to a specific problem. Share your favorite tools to get you through the day. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think like them; curate your content for them, staying true to your brand voice while making yourself useful and memorable in the competitive world of social media and the web.
Know your audience
How do they browse the web? Where do they read the latest tweets? How can you make sure they will receive the content you created specifically for them and don’t want them to miss?
There are different ways to understand how your audience finds you online and consumes content. By knowing which devices they use to browse the internet, what times a day they feel more compelled to read and what type of words they feel connected to, you can create a better message for them. Every time you create something new, you will be able to craft a message that talks directly to them and keeps you relevant.
Be Flexible and Engaging
Every platform provides a different experience for its users. Your brand needs to be consistent but also flexible so you can deliver your message as a short tweet, long status update on Facebook or Google Plus and as an image that can be shared on Pinterest and/or Instagram.
Whatever you create and want to communicate to your audience needs to be flexible enough to work with any given Social Media platform (if you’re active on several of them), and serve your audience in that specific space. Your interaction with them will also be slightly different. Engaging and acknowledging your audience creates a different level of connection and can be easily done.
We don’t interact the same way with all the platforms so this is a great space to experiment and connect in different levels with your followers, engage with them in a different way and be consistent without staying within the “same color, same font, same image” consistency idea.
Photo by: nolifebeforecoffee at Flickr