Social Media can be completely overwhelming. I get it, I’ve lived it with my own business. You’re barely getting the grasp of one platform when a new one comes in and you have to learn right away. However, it’s so important to have your brand image really established online. Why? Because social media is where your clients are hanging out. And you absolutely want to hang out in the same place as them, right? 

Think about it, how many times a day do you scroll through your Instagram feed, or check out Twitter to see what’s new, or look at Facebook to read a cool new article, or, or or…you keep on adding to that. A ton of times, right? That means that for your needs, there are a large number of companies out there that could be helping you by listening to what you’re saying and offering you the best solutions, in you language, your terms and your needs. You could be doing the same.

Traditional media is almost out. At least that’s what I think anyways. Social Media is an incredible place to expose your brand to thousands of potential new leads every single month. It’s your chance to really establish your brand and get customers to know you. Basically, you’re building awareness to who you are and developing likeability. And we all want out brands to be liked!

So, how do you do it? How do you establish your brand online? How do you brand your social media? Here are the steps I like to follow.

Create a #socialmedia strategy that’s capable of establishing + elevating your #brand

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It all starts with having a clear and consistent brand. You have to know what you’re all about, what you’re going to say in order to differentiate your business, and being super clear on who you’re targeting.
By the way, if you need any help with this at all, I have created a free email course that teaches you how to build a brand and all you need to know about branding. You can sign up right here.

Once you’re completely clear about how you will be positioning yourself and who you want to reach, you will be very clear on the type of content you need to be sharing and the platforms that will work best for your brand. Remember that your social media is an extension of your brand, so being very clear on who you are and who you serve are the first things you need to define.

Once your brand is established, you want to find your voice and the best way to communicate with your audience. It’s all about being authentic and true to what you represent as a brand. Of course, you can look to others businesses in your niche to get inspiration, but your brand has to sound like you everywhere. I have talked about this before, about how important it is to build a brand experience. Being consistent and true to who you are is part of that experience. You want to make sure that you sound the same whether it’s on your website, your social media or even in person. Every part of your brand should be aligned with who you are and what you say you do.
Of course, the more you use your brand to communicate with others, the more you will be able to find your voice and your place.

So, for example, I want my brand to be inspirational. I want people to see my success and feel that they can do it too. This means that my focus is also on being motivational. Therefore, a lot of the articles, newsletters, and social media posts I share have motivational messages attached to them.

One way to understand this is by being very clear on your brand archetype. A brand archetype is basically the personality behind your brand. I actually talked about the archetypes right here. There are 12 different categories and each has a strategy to how you communicate and how you are seen. Of course, as with everything in life, no one is just one archetype, but rather we are a mix of 2-3. Take a look at the ones below and see which ones are more aligned with your brand in order to give you direction on how to communicate better with your audience. 

Okay! So, now that you have established who you are and what your brand sounds like, it’s time to determine how your brand looks like. This will be a fundamental part of building your social media strategy. I mentioned this above, but being consistent with how you look is an incredibly important part of building an experience around your brand. So, branding your social media has different aspects to consider. We’re going to take a look at all of them.

Let’s start at the basic and most simple thing. Naming your social media. Your name — if possible, should be the same across all platforms. When you have the same name across all your profiles, it really makes it easy for your audience to find you. So, if someone follows you on Twitter, and they want to check you out on Instagram, don’t make it hard on them by having different names and having them try to figure out how to find you. For example, my webpage is fabipaolini.com, and you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and SnapChat as @fabipaolini. I really make it easy on my audience to follow me and find me, no matter where they are.

Next is defining your social picture. These, of course, should also all be the same. So, what should your social media profile picture look like? Well, it depends on what sort of brand you are.
If you have a personal brand or your business revolves around your name, it should be a photo of your face in order to show who you are and what you look like. If your brand is a business that’s not necessarily attached to a person, you could use the icon version of your logo. I don’t really recommend using your whole logo unless it adapts because it will probably be hard to read and understand. You want to make sure it’s visible and easy to see.

So, for example, Melyssa Griffin (which, by the way is incredible and you need to be following right now) has all of her profiles with the same name and picture. This makes her a lot easier to recognize.

On the other hand, Sip Tales, which are clients of mine, have all of their profiles with the icon version of their logo. Since it’s big, it’s still easy to recognize across all platforms. Get what I mean?

The next point in branding your social media is your profile bio. And, guess what I’m going to say? That your bio should also be the same. Of course, there are places where you will be allowed more characters than others. So, when space permits it, you can add more to your bio. The expert in social media, Caitlin Bacher shows you how to do it perfectly in her blog. She says that you want to start with a pain point that grabs attention to your audience and present a clear solution to that pain. You also want to include descriptive words that inspire trust. Finally, it’s really important to have a clear call to action on you bio. So, whether it’s inviting them to enroll in your free course (like I do) or to read your latest post, you want to increase the level of engagement people have with your brand. Basically, you’re inviting people into “your world.”
Here, you can see Cailtlin’s brand in action.

Now that you have identified what your profile looks like, it’s really important to be consistent with how your brand looks like in your posts. What you want to do is customize your content so that it can be shared across all platforms and really just look like you everywhere. In terms of your images, they must have your colors, style and fonts. Always. This helps build a ton of recognition for your brand. I personally don’t recommend necessarily adding your logo in ALL your posts. It really depends on what you’re posting. One of the things I have noticed is that people don’t like to feel like you’re selling to them aggressively, and heavily branded images sometimes give that impression. Basically. you want to have a balance of images that have your logo and those that simply don’t.
Anyways, I’ll show you how the images that I share look like across all platforms. This really helps in building consistency and making my brand come across the same way as well as be recognized no matter where you see it. So, if you’re pinning around in Pinterest and see an image of mine, you will instantly know it comes from my business. I have found that this really has helped me build a name for myself. One thing I do is share short versions of my articles on a variety of Facebook Groups with my images and a lot of people write to me saying that they recognize my brand and know about me thanks to those posts.

As you can see below, I have a predefined style in terms of how my publications look like. What I do is adapt them each for the platform I’m going to use them for. There are 4 main variations that I use, basically what changes is the color. There are also infographics I create and shareable images with the same “handwritten” icons. All of these use the same fonts, colors and, in this case, my logo at the bottom. These all help in establishing my brand online in social media.

In order to know whether your brand looks how it should (and it should look amazing by the way), you can sign up for my free email branding course that will tell you all you need to know to build a brand that attracts. Not only that, it explains to you what you need to know about how your brand looks like as well. You can sign up for that right here.

One thing you want to be really clear about is the purpose and goals you have behind developing your brand online. Are you looking to get more followers in order to become an influencer? Are you showcasing the work that you do? Are you focused on driving traffic to your webpage? Are you trying to get people to sign up on your email list? Whatever it is that you’re doing, make sure that the posts that you’re putting out really have your goals in mind. Don’t just post to say that you did.
Of course, each of the platforms you decide to use may have different goals depending on how you use them. But, in the end, they will all work on building your brand, so whatever you do with them has to take that into consideration.

In case you haven’t noticed the underlying theme in this article, consistency is really important in terms of building your brand. So, the next thing you want to do is define and develop a social media posting schedule taking into consideration the strategy you want to create for your brand.
If you post once in a while whenever you sort of remember, the internet will swallow you. Basically, you will be lost in the sea of people that are consistently growing their own brands. So, here I go over the basics of your posting schedule according to each platform.

Twitter is all about what your clients are doing right now. You want to post about what’s going on in your life with personal posts (of course, this applies only if you have a personal brand) and reach out to others. Twitter is a great place to share relevant articles from other bloggers or businesses that will interest or help your audience. It’s a great place to spark conversations and ask what people need help with.

You can actually connect your account to Tweriod in order to determine the best times to Tweet according to when your followers are connected. I would recommend Tweeting 5-10 times per day during the week and maybe 1-2 in the weekend. Of course, it really depends on whether your business thrives more on the weekends. So, if you were a nightclub, you probably want to to tweet more in the weekend than during weekdays.

Facebook is the place where your clients come to share about who you are. There are 2 sorts of places you can post in within Facebook.
1. Your Facebook Page which should be an extension of your webpage. You should be sharing what you do and also articles of interest for your audience.
2. Facebook Groups: This is one the places I love to post to most. There are hundreds of groups out there related to your audience. The best thing to do is join as many as you can and follow prompts according to each group. Some groups have dedicated themes for each day. You want to be as helpful as you can in answering questions for your audience. Stephanie has an incredible resource for finding great Facebook Groups for entrepreneurs. You should definitely check that out. You can learn a ton about getting visible online from Elizabeth Salazar as well! Her Facebook group is super cool by the way and filled with a ton of great content and advice.

You can check out your Insights within your Business Facebook Page which will let you know what the best times to post are for your particular page and likes. In terms of Facebook Groups, you basically want to post according to the themes I mentioned before as often as you can. For your page, I suggest posting 1-3 times per day, sharing your content and others’ as well.

Instagram is the place where your clients go to show the best version of themselves. No one shares an ugly photo of themselves on Instagram, right? (or am I the only one haha). Anyways, Instagram is a bit more personal. Here is a great place to share quotes, ideas, photos of you, your workspace, clients or where you are hanging out. It’s a bit more of a lifestyle platform than Facebook. Of course, you want to be sharing the best images possible. You can find a lot more advice on what to do on Instagram in Rosemary Watson’s page.

For Instagram you want to post at least once per day. I use an app called When To Post to find out the best times for me. If you have a business account on Instagram, you can also check out your insights to see which posts are doing better and the best times to share.

Believe it or not, Pinterest is an incredible tool for business. It’s actually responsible for around 40% of the traffic that comes to my website. I could write a whole post about Pinterest (and I probably will later) and how it can be used to build your brand. Pinterest is the place that your clients go to determine who they wish to be. Here you can share content that shows how you can help them achieve what they want!

I know this is going to sound crazy, but you want to post around 50-100 pins a day. This might sound like a crazy number, but you can actually program it weekly or even monthly pretty easily in about 20 minutes in 1 day. I use Boardbooster for this and it’s a pretty amazing tool that’s really simple to use and basically does all the work for you. Boardbooster even gives you the perfect time to share pins and does it for you.

I know it all sounds really like a lot of work and it might seem super complicated, but it’s not. Start with unifying all your profiles and then take 1 day a month to pre-program all your social media. You can do this easily with tools such as Buffer. It only takes a moment and you’re done. Another thing is that these are general guidelines that may apply to almost everyone, but your needs might be different. Depending on your goals, you probably want to work on developing one platform more than the rest. Social Media is really a wonderful way to get your brand seen, and if you use the strategies in the right way, it will really help establish your persona and elevate your brand. In case you are still unsure about how to build recognition for your brand and how to create a business that attracts — yes, specially those people on social media, you can sign up for my free 7-day email course on branding right here: