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You don’t just have to be good at creating your product or delivering your service when you’re in business for yourself. Half of the very real battle for many entrepreneurs is selling themselves and their offer and creating a presence online that is accessible and recognizable while also building brand awareness.
For many of us who already have an online active social presence, separating the personal and business can be problematic, so in this blog we take a look at how to make sure you build your brand online successfully.
Create a business persona
The types of posts you write and the pictures you put up do not need to be the types of posts you write to your friends and family, in fact they very much shouldn’t be. Instead you’re going to want to create an avatar for your business that is very separate. You may have the same face but the nature of your posts will be very different and entirely targeted to your audience. If it makes sense to you, create another public face of your company to help you better make that separation.
With this in mind, the first thing you’ll need to do is consider your target market. If you have put in some time conducting your market research you should already know which social media platforms your customers use and when they are most likely to be accessing them.
Be targeted
Although it might seem that you should be on all platforms at once it makes no sense in terms of your time or money to spend precious time creating posts that won’t speak directly to your customer.
So, if your customer is an avid Instagram user concentrate your efforts there and don’t spend nearly as much time on Facebook. The same for Twitter. If you’re targeting the professional market then something like LinkedIn is going to serve you better, as it has for Philip McTigue of NY.
When you’ve target your social media platforms, you need to start building a deliberate strategy. Don’t think random postings, even daily postings will not do the job, you’re talking about building a message, character and identity around your brand, not a series of posts that don’t appear to be linked.
Think very carefully about how you use images and steer clear of posting anything personal, stick with genuinely clever memes and GIFS that fit into your corporate online identity.
Setting up your profile isn’t hard but making it and keeping it relevant is, so make sure that you know what you’re doing before you start hitting the post keys. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you have your customer research in place that shows you who and where you should be concentrating your time and efforts.
Get your killer social media strategy up and running and you’ll soon be raising your brand awareness and hopefully generating traffic to your site. Start incorporating updates and responses into your everyday morning work routine and you’ll be on your way to social success in no time.
Growing Forward 