Building and growing a successful business heavily depends on a well-established online presence.
According to statistical data, 59% of the world’s population uses social media. Some of the biggest social networking sites include Facebook (36.64% market share), YouTube, and Instagram. TikTok also made substantial gains through 2020 and 2021, reaching a user base of 1 billion in January 2022.
So, if you’re trying to reach and engage your target audience, it’s evident that social media offers huge potential. Especially if you also consider that the average person spends more than 2 hours browsing social networks daily.
However, for your brand to get the most out of its online activity, you must pay attention to how you set up your presence on the platforms of your choice. This article will go over the best practices for setting up your brand’s social media profiles so that you can guarantee the best possible ROI from your social media marketing efforts.
1. Use all the relevant profile fields
The easiest way to guarantee that your social media profiles are ready to attract customers and present your brand as a credible and trustworthy organization is to ensure you populate your bio with as much information as possible.
By using all the relevant profile fields and presenting your potential customers with helpful information, you’ll not only display your professionalism but also make it far easier for prospects to get in touch with your representatives. This will shorten the sales cycle and maximize the ROI of publishing content on one or several social media networks.
To see why this matters in practice, check out the following two brands and how they’ve set up their Facebook profiles.
First we have Foreo. This Swedish brand ensures its prospects using Facebook have access to all the relevant information regarding the business and its product. In addition to correctly categorizing its company and including a website link, an email address, and a fully populated Facebook shop, Foreo also has a short but sufficiently informative About section.
Alongside the posts and product photos, its About section gives consumers an excellent idea of what the business does and offers, maximizing their chances of recognizing a product that could solve their pain points.
Source: facebook.com
On the other hand, if you check out a Facebook profile from a business like RoofingWaterproofing19, you’ll see how big of a mistake leaving out information can be. This business has no listed address, website, or phone number. And what’s more, its lack of activity suggests that it’s no longer active, making it much less likely for the Facebook page to actually attract leads for the company.
Source: facebook.com
2. Showcase your value proposition
The second super-simple hack to get more out of your social media activity is to ensure you showcase your value proposition.
People will often encounter your brand for the first time on one of your social media profiles, and there’s no single way for that to happen. Perhaps they’ll be served one of your ads, or they might discover you via search. In any of these cases, what’s important is that you clearly communicate your value proposition from the get-go. This will help your prospects understand what your company does. And more importantly, it will make it easier for them to recognize the value you could offer them by solving their pain points.
If you browse social media, you’ll see countless examples of businesses missing an opportunity to attract and engage followers by failing to showcase their value proposition.
For example, the Sensodyne UK Instagram account only states that it’s the “official account for Sensodyne UK.” Other than that, it invites people to submit their queries and complaints on the brand’s official website while reserving the clickable link section for a Google Docs document outlining the rules of a competition that had passed several weeks before.
Source: instagram.com
Of course, you don’t have to go overboard with making promises on your social media profiles. But ensuring that you at least state what you do, like what Nivea does on its Instagram account, will guarantee that your prospects recognize the value they could receive by investing in your solutions.
Source: instagram.com
3. Be consistent with your visual branding
Your brand’s visual identity hugely impacts how your target audience perceives your business. After all, we know that people make first impressions based on visual cues.
According to research data:
- People form opinions about websites in approximately 50 milliseconds, with their first impression often impacting the perceived level of trustworthiness and credibility they assign to a company.
- When visiting a website for the first time, the element web visitors look at before anything else is usually the brand’s logo, showing just how important a business’ visual calling card is to consumers.
- According to a study from the University of Loyola, color increases brand recognition by up to 80%, which is why people readily associate the combination of blue and yellow with Ikea or the deep green mermaid logo with Starbucks. It’s also why sticking to a predefined color palette could make your social media profiles stand out from the crowd.
- Visuals often drive emotional connections between brands and their customers. So, knowing that 57% of people spend more money with brands they feel emotionally connected to, it’s no surprise that investing in an attractive visual identity is an effective way to drive your company’s growth.
The only way for a brand’s visual identity to stick — and resonate — is to be consistent with it. Fortunately, this can be easy to accomplish on social media. All you need to do is post visuals that align with your brand’s visual identity. Or, if you know you need to use a wide variety of images, do what Thankbox does and add your logo to the pictures you post.
Source: instagram.com
4. Shine a spotlight on social proof
Social proof is a hugely impactful tool you can use to convert customers. After all, 66% of people find reviews impactful when deciding what products to invest in/what brands to support. Plus, around 95% of people read reviews before even starting their shopping journey.
Don’t forget to shine a spotlight on social proof to encourage trust, build authority, and boost conversions using your social media profiles. You can do this in multiple ways.
For instance, knowing that UGC is one of the most convincing types of social proof, you can repost content from your followers that mentions your brand or products. This is what haircare brand Fable & Mane does on Instagram with great success.
Source: instagram.com
Or, you could choose a more direct approach and turn user reviews into social media posts. If you check out the Barner Instagram page, you’ll see this is what this brand does to convince followers to try out its products.
Source: instagram.com
Lastly, don’t forget about displaying star ratings on your Facebook page. If you check out the World of Wedgewood profile, you’ll instantly notice the impressive 4.7-star rating, which has tremendous potential for helping the brand attract and convert new customers.
Source: facebook.com
5. Create a link landing page for your Instagram and TikTok bio
Social media can be a valuable source of website traffic. In fact, the 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report from Unbounce discovered that traffic from social media networks resulted in a median 7.6% conversion rate for ecommerce brands, more than 2x as much as the average CR coming from paid search.
For this reason, it’s not a bad idea to explore ways to use your social media profiles as a source of targeted, high-value traffic.
Now, you can and should use the native functionalities offered by most social platforms to do this. However, if most of your social activity happens on Instagram, you might find the network a bit limiting as it doesn’t allow businesses to add links to regular posts — only to stories and one main profile link.
Fortunately, there’s a super-simple workaround: creating a link landing page with a service like Linktree or Taplink. Doing this allows your followers to navigate to pages on your website that meet their interests. More importantly, you can use these tools to track the effectiveness of your social media activity, measure the amount of traffic they drive, and figure out how much value they create for your business.
For a great example of this strategy in action, check out the January LinkinBio landing page. You’ll see that most of the brand’s posts lead visitors to educational blog posts, which offer unique value and great insights for those interested in continuous glucose monitoring.
Moreover, the top section of the landing page presents prospects with relevant links, like the one inviting them to join the brand’s Beta waitlist or that which leads them to the webpage discussing the science behind January’s solutions.
Source: linkin.bio
6. Reinforce your physical existence
Having a well-utilized social media presence can make reaching and converting customers a breeze. Still, it’s important to remember that a social media existence, in itself, won’t be enough to encourage your prospects to trust your brand or invest in your products. For this reason, it’s not a bad idea to use your social media profiles to call your audience’s attention to the fact that you are a real business that exists in the real world.
Generally, what you need to do is populate your profile with information regarding your business’s:
- Physical location
- Contact number
- Email address
- Alternative social media profiles
This will be more than enough to prove your brand’s authenticity and encourage trust among your target audience. And the best part is that it’s super simple to do, especially on networks like Facebook. Just check out how ATH establishes its physical existence thanks to a few pieces of information most brands forget to add to their social profiles.
Source: facebook.com
If you prefer to do things uniquely or unexpectedly, you can set up your social media pages to highlight more specific details that can establish your brand’s authenticity.
A quick look at the Maison&Objet Twitter profile shows how this particular brand uses its bio to invite followers to a live event, where people can interact with new brands, visit exciting exhibitions, and attend more than 30 conferences to learn something new about interior design.
Source: twitter.com
7. Ensure your founders’ professional profiles are visible
Last but not least, as you undertake the mission of setting up your brand’s social media presence in a way guaranteed to drive results, don’t forget that companies’ reputations are intertwined with their founders’/employees’ personas.
So, someone active on social media represents your brand, do your best to guarantee that that person’s activity is aligned with your brand’s values, mission, and professionalism and that it plays a part in spreading the message about your solutions.
For instance, if you go to the Menlo Coaching website, you’ll see that the company’s Team page allows visitors to check out the LinkedIn profile of each employee. On the surface, this seems overkill. But suppose you consider that every single one of these employees keeps publishing valuable and helpful content about the MBA admissions process. In that case, it becomes instantly clear that the LinkedIn activity doesn’t just act as a form of social proof for the business.
But, more importantly, it can be seen as one of Menlo Coaching’s main audience reach strategies, which allows it to stand out from its competitors and grab the attention of applicants looking for consulting services.
Source: linkedin.com
Brush Up on Social Media Best Practices
As you can see, setting up your brand’s social media profiles can be simple. However, you can rest assured that by following the tips outlined in this article, you’ll have a much easier time reaching your goals than if you skip these essential steps of establishing your brand’s online presence.
To guarantee continuous success, you will have to dedicate time and resources to producing and distributing valuable social media content. You’ll also need to pour plenty of effort into engaging your followers. But none of that will be as effective if your profiles haven’t been set up properly. So get your basics right, and you’ll be well on your way to achieving any of your social media marketing goals.
