Social media is one of the most important tools that you have at your disposal to draw attention to your brand. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are three great platforms whereby you can display your products and services, create daily or weekly posts and tweets about your services, and even purchase ads to drive more targeted traffic your way. Pinterest and Google Plus also allow you to unveil your brand to the world using the unique tools available on each of these unique platforms.
But how do you create and maintain your web presence using these services? The key is in integration across platforms and using your social profiles, headers, and backgrounds as 24/7 billboards for your brand.
What You Need is a Plan for Social Media Headers
The ideal ad strategy would be an approach that includes the best of all of these platforms to create the kind of hype that makes people want to share your message with their online social media friends. You need to become recognizable across the different social media outlets so that the message and the branding that you are projecting becomes the same, no matter where your customers are coming from.
To better understand this as a whole, it is beneficial to first look at the individual parts before deciding how to integrate them together.
Facebook: The Virtual Social Channel
What brings people to Facebook? Millions of people every day check into Facebook. They are checking for posts from their friends to keep up with what they are doing. They are checking for messages from potential new contacts and sharing information on cool products that they found online. Facebook has become the center of sharing when it comes to shopping online for products. One reason this has happened is due to the powerful effect that our friends have on our buying decisions.
When someone sees an item they are truly impressed with, they want to share it with others. Sharing is a simple one-click process when you are on Facebook and it is effortless to do. For this reason, more people click and share their purchases that they make online via Facebook than with any other platform or medium.
Facebook also allows interconnectivity among business groups or social groups. Facebook is about one-to-one connections through private messaging and posts to a specific person’s page. But it is also a highly social medium, which reaches beyond the boundaries of the one-to-one contact and spreads to the social groups of people with common interests.
So Facebook is an important medium and platform that you should use to reach a large number of people with your brand and your message.
The Power of Tweeting
Twitter, once considered second fiddle to Facebook, is quickly gaining ground in terms of the social media power it has to reach the world with your message. But there are some significant differences between Twitter and Facebook which should be noted.
You can see some of our most redesign Twitter header designs below. See how each of them promote the brand and marketing message, while also working seamlessly into the design and engagement of Twitter profiles.
Comparing Facebook and Twitter
- Facebook reaches a broader audience than Twitter in general and your posts can remain at the top of your news feed for days. Twitter only makes your post prominent for a short period of time before it is replaced in importance by the latest new tweets. This makes Twitter harder to maintain in terms of promoting your brand and limits the information to only a few characters at a time.
- Twitter is great for fast tweets and blasts that people may detect on their radar for the short time it is up. And, as a result, they may add you as a friend. So what you say on Twitter is extremely important and you should also keep this short to maximize the attention span of your intended audience.
- Both Facebook and Twitter help you promote your brand and products by keeping your business on the radar of people who are interested in what you have to offer.
Google Plus-Another Social Media Opportunity
One sometimes overlooked social media platform is Google Plus. It is often overlooked because there is so much emphasis on Facebook and Twitter that it sometimes gets lost in the mix. In addition, it is an Google tool, and Google is so integrated into everyone’s lives with their personal and business tools that people don’t realize the impact it can have.
But Google Plus allows you to mix business with pleasure by creating your own personal or business profile. Then you are able to list the associations and credits that you have to your name in your profession as a part of your official profile. Because of this, it has a little bit of the “LinkedIn” options, which is highly-focused on one’s career and allows users to display their work or careers connections for potential employers to see.
Google Plus also allows the user to post updates, share blog posts from Blogger.com, or join communities and forums where they can advertise their brand among like-minded social groups. This is like advertising for free in front of thousands of people. You do have to exercise caution when posting on Google Plus special groups, so that the users do not feel you are spamming them. First, get acquainted with their platform and make some connections before attempting to promote your brand.
While Google Plus might not be the most used social network, it still gets massive exposure on a daily basis. Here are a few ideas on how your brand can be using Google Plus to bring in more leads and brand awareness.
Bringing it All Together
All of these social media platforms have their strong points and they all serve a purpose for businesses who wish to make themselves more prominent with the online environment and spread the word about their brand to the masses.
But, in order to bring your whole promotional strategy together, the following steps should be implemented:
- Utilize each platform for what they are good for. Facebook should be used for longer posts, while Twitter should be used more often for shorter blasts and for customer acquisition. Twitter encourages people to add you when they see a tweet they like, so it is more inducive to lead generation.
- Cross-advertise by linking from your Twitter to your Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Pinterest profiles or posts. This will also result in more relevant search results in Google.
- Create a stunning infographic that encapsulates your branding, using your logo to attract views and place it across platforms.
- Make your message for your brand the same across all of the platforms, in order to avoid confusion among visitors, no matter what platform they see you on.
The above tips will help you focus your message and target the audience that you want to focus on, no matter where people find you. Remember that you do not know how people might share your message or logo, video, or social media blast. So you need to be present with the same branding and the same look across the platforms.
This can be confusing at times, but integration of social media is one of the most important strategies that you must employ if you are to truly create and maintain your brand to the people you want to bring to your site.
Sometimes it helps to get an analysis from the experts in terms of how you are doing with your branding. They can often suggest subtle changes in your logo, your animation videos, or even your website that can produce big changes that will increase the relevance and importance of your brand in a rapidly-competing market.
For information on how you can achieve branding across the platforms using some of these important tools, contact the Infographic Design Team for more information.
Not every logo or infographic was created equal. Just like there are differences among the various social media platforms, there are also differences between types of graphics. What you need is an infographic that not only captures the essence of your brand but also is custom-designed to work well with the various social media platforms from which people come to you.
Creating a memorable social media profile and header image may be all it takes to drive traffic your way, increase your brand’s presence on the web, and make people want to learn more about what you do. Remember, integration is key. But start with the graphics.
Remember you only have about 15 seconds to make people fall in love with your brand.
Make a great first impression with a social media graphic.
