What's the Importance of Social Media in Brand Building?

Social media is an influential platform for marketers to build brand awareness and authority. In fact, according to Data Reportal’s 2022 report, 75% of web surfers use social media to research brands. And with 4.59 billion active users, social media is a great platform to build brand awareness and grow your business.

Savvy marketers heavily focus on social media as a part of their marketing strategy since it is a relatively inexpensive medium with a high reach. It also lends an authentic image that helps growing brands and established companies in their marketing efforts.

In this article, we will look at the importance of social media in brand building and the elements that make your social media presence impactful.

Why is Social Media Important in Brand Building?

While there are many benefits businesses can get from being active on social media, here are the top 12 benefits it offers.

1. Increases brand awareness

Social media is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to magnify your brand awareness and marketing reach. It allows you to connect with your audience in a more direct and accessible way. Additionally, it builds relationships by helping spread your brand's vision and message. With the right mix of creativity and posting frequency, your business's social media presence can significantly impact your bottom line.

According to a 2022 report, Facebook is still a market leader, with 2.58 billion active users monthly. It may be a profitable platform to explore if you're just starting.

2. Positions you as a thought leader

Posting educational content on social media will not only help you interact with your potential customers. It can also help you generate leads, improve brand loyalty and establish product credibility.

Source: Ahrefs

Commonly used platforms for sharing informative B2B content are LinkedIn and Twitter. Both allow brands to post text-based content, images, videos, and carousels to reach their audiences. When creating thought leadership content, try using longer and scannable formats.

Matt Reeves, the CEO of Together, expands:

“At Together, we have a small presence on LinkedIn. To grow our audience, we know that publishing consistently and engaging with users is important. In addition to that, we've also started interviewing subject matter experts and sharing bite-sized insights. Tagging them when doing so is a great way to leverage their audience to grow our own."

3. Humanizes your business

Consumers can get a perfect idea of who you are as a brand by the type of content you share on social media. By sharing a mix of content that is relatable, you humanize your brand and make it appear trustworthy. Furthermore, meaningfully engaging with your audience frequently can help achieve this. Take a cue from SEMRush.

They actively interact with their followers and quickly respond to any mentions of them across platforms. Not only are they consistent with their posting schedule, but they also strike the right balance between personality and professionalism.

4. Help you remain connected with your community

People spend roughly 2.5 hours daily on social and messaging platforms. With social media, you can post frequently, be visible, and remain at the top of your audience’s minds. You can also opt for post-scheduling tools to ensure you are always on track.

Source: Global Elementor Community

For example, the Global Elementor Community has 135.6K members on its private Facebook group. The members of the community post actively to learn how to navigate the tool and to resolve any challenges they come across. The group is handled by volunteer moderators, which only shows they prioritize the community they are building — as seen above.

Pro Tip: An online community — be it on social media or your website — is a great way to remain connected with customers.

5. Increases website traffic

An underrated benefit of posting content to social media is the traffic it attracts to your website. You can repurpose your blog content to an Instagram carousel or a Twitter thread. Link these back to your website for your audience to get a detailed understanding of the topic.

For example, Shopify recently posted a reel in collaboration with the Shopify Partners account that directs their followers to their website to purchase their latest merchandise.

6. Assists in lead generation

Social media helps you target the low-hanging fruit. People interested in your brand by following you or liking your content are more likely to purchase from you. So, you run ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to attract a relevant audience and generate more leads for your business.

For example, Tilli Software — a US-based fintech business — ran a promotion on LinkedIn to encourage sign-ups by offering a free trial to test their product.

Source: Tilli Software

7. Increases sales

For growing businesses, their sales are the only metric that matters. An online presence is vital to help your prospect down the sales funnel. It immediately fosters trust in the people and helps them connect with you. So, aligning your sales and social media marketing efforts is essential to see quicker results.

Canva recently tweeted a link to “Canva Print” for customers to design physical products. They also shared they will be planting a tree for every order they receive to encourage their buyers gently.

8. Improves reach with influencer programs

Not only does posting often help you reach larger audiences but partnering with the right influencers can help you get visibility in front of the right people. Even data supports the returns brands get from their influencer marketing programs — 11x the ROI. They create engaging posts that lend an authentic voice to your brand too. You can also run affiliate programs to help improve your reach and increase sales.

For example, Notion gained considerable popularity on TikTok. It blew up when students started creating videos of the workflow management tool. Some user-generated content from popular accounts has amassed over 1 million views, and there are now several dedicated (albeit unofficial) Notion accounts.

9. Great for engagement

Social media is an excellent platform for directly engaging with your audience. This means you can ask them questions, get feedback, and interact with your customers in an open way that helps you gain insights. This can be very valuable if you want to know if your products work for your clients or customers.

You can leverage in-built features such as audience polls on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get quick feedback from your community.

A well-known B2B example is Adobe Creative Cloud on Facebook. They often post memes, relatable content, and user creations to engage with their audience and show the endless possibilities of innovations using their product.

Source: Adobe Creative Cloud

10. Channel for customer service

Consumers generally voice their opinions or seek resolutions on social media regarding order updates, product features, and more. You can forge a strong relationship based on proactive support and top-notch user experience by having a dedicated social media team that actively responds to these queries.

This approach to customer service can be made in conjunction with traditional methods such as emails and live chats on your website. Look at how Loom actively responds to customer queries and complaints.

To be fair, responding to customer queries isn’t always the easiest job — you have to be prompt, polite, and unflappable. And when your answers are available for the world to see (aka on social media platforms), it’s even more important that your interactions with customers are above reproach.

11. Analyzing competitors

To make better marketing decisions, it is wise to analyze how your competitors use their social media platforms. However, it is not easy to monitor what your competitors are doing manually. So, brand monitoring software can help you access relevant data and customizable insights on where your brand stands against your competitors.

Doing a competitor analysis can also help you remain abreast of industry trends and new launches that can help you create impactful campaigns and meet your marketing goals.

12. Helps in verifying ROI

Social media is a very useful tool for a business, especially when you want to see its return on investment (ROI). According to Hubspot’s 2021 report, here is how these social media platforms fared in terms of ROI profitability for marketers:

• Facebook — 40%

• Instagram — 30%

• LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube — <10%

You could either rely on this data or test your performance on each platform to see which ones work for your brand.

What Makes an Impactful Social Media Brand Presence?

Here are the 4 pillars that can help your brand create a strong impact across different social media channels:

1. Strong visuals

Social media is changing how we share information. The way we get our information, have conversations, and even form opinions are being affected by social media platforms.

With that in mind, marketing teams must ensure that their visual assets are as strong as possible. This means that images, videos, and other assets must be of high quality. They need to stand out among other posts on the platform. Strong visuals can make all the difference in making an impact.

Source: Notion

2. Powerful storytelling

Developing a compelling brand narrative for your company is crucial to success in social media. Your narrative should be clear and concise, expressing what your company or organization stands for and its goals.

It helps potential customers understand the personality of your business. If you have a unique and exciting story, make sure people know about it. A clear brand narrative can help attract new followers and spread the word about your business.

3. Identifiable brand voice

Remember to have an identifiable brand voice on social media to improve brand recall. With so many brands fighting to get their brand to reach larger audiences, it's important to stand out. The best way to do this is to have a brand voice that is unique and consistent. A recognizable brand voice will help you establish genuine brand interactions and develop a better relationship with your audience.

Speaking on their social media strategy, Jocelyn Ho, US Content Lead at 360Learning, says:

“Our goal with social media for brand building isn't about being present on as many platforms as possible. Building an effective social media strategy starts with identifying the most appropriate and relevant channels for your brand messaging and identity.”

For example, Slack uses its brand colors and user-generated content to perform well continually.

Source: Slack

4. Consistently posting quality content

Since social media is a great way to grow followers and build a community, you must focus on creating quality content. You can do this by sharing informative and entertaining content. This content also needs to align with your brand voice and message so that you only attract a relevant audience. You can work with design tools like Canva to create stunning visuals in different formats.

Final Thoughts

Social media is a powerful tool for any business because it brings with it the ability to build a brand and engage with customers on a more personal level making for a positive business experience. It is a significant factor in brand building. Its host of benefits makes it an indisposable tool for any marketer.

There are many ways that marketing through social media can be beneficial to a business. With social media, companies can build a reputation, attract new customers, retain existing customers, establish a presence in the marketplace, and enhance customer loyalty.

If you’re looking for brand insights that can revolutionize your brand strateegy, book a demo with Latana.