It’s no secret that social media is a difficult market to approach. Constantly changing algorithms, oversaturated platforms, the myth of the viral video, and the impossibly short life cycle of the social media trend can make it hard for brands and businesses to find their place in these digital spheres. With so much noise, content, and character being shared every single minute, how is a single small business meant to gain any traction?
In this week’s blog post, I want to share some of the smallest yet often overlooked secrets of building a great social media profile for your brand. From understanding just what to write in your bio, to choosing your perfect pinned post, these tips can help your business to stand out from the crowd and go toe-to-toe with the biggest names on social media in a few simple clicks.
So if you want to learn how to improve your professional social media profile, grab a pen, a coffee and let’s get started!
1. Customisation
When setting up any social media profile, from Tiktok to Twitter, it’s important to establish your brand identity from your very first post. Use the inbuilt customization tools provided to help create a profile that fits to your chosen colour scheme, that clearly represents your brand and that is guaranteed to reach the right kind of audience. Take care when choosing your profile’s interests and topics, focusing on certain keywords that best represent your industry. Follow your competitors as well as potential customer bases on your first day online. Find a username that’s easy to spell, and replicate it across as many social media sites as you can, so that potential users can easily find you when switching platforms.
Find small and quirky ways to represent your brand voice throughout your profile, perhaps with emojis or icons in areas of text, or branded images to represent different sections of your profile. Fill out every single form field you can and make sure to really pay attention to detail when adding in links, email addresses, and contact details. Your profile needs to look polished and professional to keep up with your competitors, so small mistakes and broken links are a definite no-go when it comes to social media marketing.
Finally, always make sure to take a look at your profile from a visitor’s perspective, whether you use a friend’s phone, visitor mode or an incognito tab, to see what your customers will see when they visit your site. Is all of the information they might need easily available? Will they be able to recognise your brand on every different platform? Can they access your website or digital space through your social media site? Complete these checks, and then hit publish!
2. High Quality Imagery
There’s nothing worse than scrolling through your feed and finding a badly cropped image of a product you really want to buy. Or spending half an hour trying to work out whether that pixelated blob is a price tag or a product shot. It’s so important to get high quality, pixel-free and perfectly sized images for each different social media site you promote on. From your profile picture to your header to your posts, every image needs to be clear, eye-catching and on-brand, whether it’s a photograph or a custom design.
Use the following dimensions when cropping and sizing your social media images, to help them fit to each sites specifications:
Twitter: 1600 x 900px
Instagram: 1080 x 1080px
LinkedIn: 1200 x 627px
Facebook: 1200 x 630px
Pinterest: 1080 x 1920px
TikToks: 1080 x 1920px
Source: Hootsuite
3. Consistency
Consistency is key when it comes to posting on social media and updating your profile. Firstly, it’s important to share the brand colours and styles across every platform your post on, whether that means customizing the colours in your Tiktok videos to match your Twitter profile or making sure that the same logo is in the profile photo of every single account.
It’s also important to make sure that your posting schedule stays consistent too. Although there are always going to be varying opinions about whether sharing duplicate content on different platforms is truly valuable, in my opinion, it’s not a chance worth risking. You never know where engagement might happen, and so the more you post, the more likely you are to receive some traction for it. So keep sharing and keep your profiles alive!
4. Good Design
If you’re a business or a brand that uses graphic design as part of your marketing strategy, it’s so important to get it right. Whilst images and photographs can often speak for themselves, graphics and posts need a little bit more attention to truly make an impact on your audience. Take the time to find out what your brand’s graphic design style is, whether it’s bold and colourful posts with big text and fun assets or cool and minimalist posts, with neutral palettes and earth tones.
Online design spaces like Canva and Crello offer easy-to-use templates for a huge variety of social posts, automatically spaced and sized for each different social post, and are so easy to learn that they can be a huge asset to your strategy. Even if you simply use their templates as inspiration, having a guide to follow when creating your posts can make a lot of difference to their end result.
5. Brand Voice
Before you ask – yes, brand voice does cover the ever-dreaded bio. Writing content on your social media profile doesn’t have to be scary, and it can often be a simple as describing your business to a friend. Using language that best represents your businesses’ style, i.e. cool, friendly, warm, funny, professional… start putting down some sentences that sum up what your business does and who for. Most bios have restricted character limits, so it can be difficult to cram it all in, but this can actually help you get to the point and take out some of the waffle we tend to add in when writing normally.
Short and sweet bios can also be accompanied by relevant emojis, well-spaced keywords, and even email addresses too to help provide users with even more ways to get in touch! Take a look at some bios from other businesses similar to yours and see if they can provide any inspiration!
6. Frequent Maintenance
Frequently updating, monitoring, and changing your social media profile can be a great way to help your users and customers know that you’re an active, engaged business online. From following social and societal trends to creating seasonal and themed logos, keeping up to date with your digital space and the events happening within are a great way to keep your profile creative and fresh!
On Instagram, in particular, sharing links is near impossible, so often links to blog posts, new product pages, and case studies can be shared in the bio. Making sure your bio is regularly updated on bio to reflect your latest content is vital for allowing your users to engage with it!
I hope these tips have helped you to improve your own social media profiles, or even inspired you to make them over completely! If you have any more questions about social marketing strategies, branding, or post design, I am always happy to talk through them. Drop me a message at hello@nikkimccaig.com for more information!
Have a great week!