Let’s keep it real; keeping it real can be tough.
In this day and age, people expect a lot from your brand and chief among those expectations is a personal connection. They don’t perceive you as a monolith that is just a shilling product, they perceive you as an organic entity to be interacted with.
In other words, what matters is engagement and personal branding in social media. Keeping things personal means engaging with your audience and customers on a meaningful, individual level. Why? Because while you may have hundreds, thousands or even millions of customers, each and every individual customer has a singular relationship with you which they place more value on, proportionally speaking.
If you flip the script and consider the level of annoyance and potential bitterness you might have if your messages to someone you respect are left on “read” or “seen”.
So what can you be doing to keep it 100 % with your audience and maintain personal branding in social media?
Communication
This one is obvious, if your brand is on social media platforms (it’s two decades into the 21st century so we’re assuming you do) taking the “social” part of “social media” as seriously as the “media” part is pretty much the lowest hanging fruit. It’s a must.
The best personal relationships are based on open communication, the same rule applies to the business world. You need to be giving as much as you’re receiving.
In practice, that means things like answering Instagram messages, replying to FB comments, going live on IG, etc.
Of course, there’s the touchy subject of criticism and given the sheer amount of access all this tech in gives everyone, you may hear a lot more of it than you’re ready for. People don’t always tell you when things are going great with your product or service but they’ll let you know the second they go south.
It’s important to have a strategy for being able to navigate the criticisms in a way that works for you. Oddly enough, and on a positive note, publicly dealing with a customer issue can create a positive perception of your brand and make you appear even more personable. The power of direct communication.
In the end, just be social. Be communicative. Show them you care because, to be honest, you do.
Stay True to Your Brand
Being authentic is always in style and your audience and customers can smell inauthenticity, or fakeness, from a mile away.
Your best bet as a business is to drop the charade and stay true to your brand, also known as remaining personal in social media. Consumers respond to what feels real. What feels real is relatable and what’s relatable is personal. That’s what it’s about.
And how to go about that is not all that difficult, what’s difficult is cultivating and maintaining an image and brand persona that isn’t true. A façade of sorts. That’s tough to keep going. Honesty is easy.
A big part of staying true and authentic is the aforementioned communication, if that’s not part of your brand, you need to make it so. Almost equal weight to talking the talk though is the consistency with which you do it. Flakiness is not an option. If your buddy keeps missing your softball games every Tuesday, how long are you going to let that slide before you replace him? Same with your customers.
Consistency doesn’t end at communication, it should be a brand-wide mission, if you pride yourself on the consistent quality of the product then that same standard should be applied in everything else you do.
Need Help With Branding and Staying Personal? We Got You.
It can be tough keeping things personal in the world we live in, if your brand is struggling to relate on social media, needs a makeover or the development of a strategy for success, reach out to us. At The Snow Agency, we live and breathe this, and getting your brand to connect with your audience is what we do.