Positioning Your Brand on Social Media

Everything that you do on the Internet is a reflection of your brand, and a simple Google search for your brand name will reveal how strongly the search engines value social media. Often your social media profiles will be the first to appear in results, followed closely by your posted updates, comments, images, and shares.

This can be taken as both a warning sign and a welcome gift that the ways in which you position your brand on social media can have paramount impact on its success. For best results, follow a few key best practices like these:

Keep Your Profiles Current

Review your social media profiles regularly and keep them updated. Check the spellings of your business and contact names. Check that the phone numbers and other contact information is still current and accurate. Make sure any links are active. And update your keywords, products, and description to reflect any recent changes.

Be Consistent in Your Presentation

Decide how you want to appear to your customers — from the colors and fonts you use to the types of images to the style of speech in your headlines and copy — and stick with it. Social media content streams through people’s lives at breakneck pace. But with these simple consistencies in the ways in which you present your content, people will subtly start to recognize your personal stamp beneath the content.

They’ll start to be able to spot content sourced from you before they even register what it’s about. And once they can do that, they’ll start to rely on you to keep providing that type of value in that type of package.

Craft the Perfect Offer

An offer is simply what your business provides its customers. A perfect offer is one your customers value and cannot find anywhere else. When you can craft this type of offer (often termed a “Unique Selling Proposition”) in as succinct, accurate, and appealing a manner as possible, then you have equipped yourself with a potent tool for attracting active, interested customers willing to pay you for that offer.

This is where knowing your business and your competition as intimately as possible can pay off hugely. So take your time with this, because the perfectly crafted offer (or USP, message, positioning statement — what have you) can pay off for years to come.

Certainly there are many more best practices for positioning your brand on social media, but if you start out with just these three, you’ll position yourself a lot farther ahead of the pack from the get-go.

Jonah Engler is a financial expert from NYC.