How to be consistent with your branding on social media
Social media can be a bit of a minefield. Between Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, it’s no wonder we’re all a little overwhelmed. We’re always in a rush to create new content, to share what we’re up to, and to promote our products and services. If you feel like your Insta-game isn’t quite hitting the spot, you might want to think about how you’re using your branding across social media.
Consistent branding will help your customers recognise both you and your business immediately, helping build brand recognition, trust and loyalty. We tend to be more likely to buy something if we know the brand already, so if you up your consistency, you could well see an increase in orders and bookings.
Convinced? Read on for our top tips on how to become more consistent with your branding on social media.
Get the basics right
Let’s start at the beginning. When it comes to consistency, we want to make sure we’re getting the basics right. Use the same logo variation and colour combinations across social media platforms and choose imagery and graphics that complement your style.
For example if you have a secondary logo mark, this is perfect for your social profiles. Applying the same logo mark across channels in the same colour-way will help your audience recognise your brand more easily.
Colour is one of the most easily identified brand signifiers therefore use this to your advantage. On Instagram, for example, use your colour palette to create branded Highlights covers, and on LinkedIn, be consistent with your featured links. The same goes for cover photos on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, use your brand colours if you’re designing a graphic or choose images which contain or complement your colour scheme.
In this digital world we now live in, your social media profiles function as a sort of shop window for you and your business. When potential customers ‘visit’ this shop window, we want them to be able to recognise you immediately. Consistent branding will also help your content stand out amongst the noise.
Add an extra touch
Once you’ve got the basics covered, we can move on to adding a little extra ‘something’ to give your brand recognition an extra boost. Your typographic style and decorative elements all help to express your brand’s personality. Therefore it’s essential to choose a style that further helps to communicate what your brand stands for if you want to be creating an authentic brand image.
For example, Mumfolk’s graphic style originates from our empowering roots, using a graphic language from protest posters and women’s rights movements. Condensed type, over-printing and duotone images all help us communicate female empowerment to our audience.
Use your brand style as much as you can when it comes to creating content. On Instagram, for example, branded Reels and IGTV covers go a long way. We particularly love Mother Pukkas’s branded Reels colors - they stand out, they’re immediately identifiable, and they look good on her grid, too.
If you don’t create much video content, try interspersing your branded graphics and illustrations throughout your Stories and grid posts. And if you’re really short on time, ensure all text on your Instagram Stories is in your brand colour. It’s simple, but highly effective. Check out Vestpod’s Reels for an example: founder Emilie uses red text on each of her Reels, meaning they’re easy to spot.
Repurpose your content
One surefire (and super easy) way to ensure brand consistency across social media is to repurpose your content from one platform to another. Let’s say you’ve created a branded swipe-through guide for Instagram. You can share each of those images to your Stories individually, as well as posting the carousel to LinkedIn and Twitter. You get more bang for your buck, and you’re boosting your consistency at the same time. Don’t worry about people seeing the same content twice on different platforms - we can promise that no one’s paying that much attention!
Create brand guidelines - and stick to them!
If you’re ever considering outsourcing your social media design, you’ll want to have a clear set of brand guidelines ready to share. Your brand guidelines will cover everything from tone of voice, to how your logos and secondary brand marks should be used. The social media portion of your brand guidelines will cover how posts should look (colour, fonts, layout examples), as well as image/illustration style right down to how often emojis and GIFs should be used. It might sound a little overboard, but once you’re outsourcing, you’ll be glad you spent the time getting your guidelines down on paper as you’ll spend less time feeding back or directing changes.
Having basic design templates set up, rather than designing from scratch every time is also an essential step for keeping things on-brand (not to mention saving you tonnes of time!). These templates don’t have to be complicated, often simple is more effective when it comes to visual communication. We recommend you set up 3 templates, one template for each type of content you post on a regular basis (educational carousel, quote, sales post etc), then use your brand colours to create different colour combinations for each template.
The end result? 9 branded ready to use templates!
Hire a professional
At the end of the day, there’s a reason why so many business owners struggle with the social media portion of their job. It’s hard work, it requires a lot of creativity, and sometimes we just don’t have time to create new content. Even if you enjoy the design side, it’s easy to slip up in your consistency from time to time, and that’s not a problem at all. To make your life easier, consider hiring a designer to create branded social media templates. This is a particularly good idea if you have a higher ticket offering, because customers will expect to see an added level of quality in your visuals and social media content.
Hiring someone to create Instagram post and Story templates, for example, will cut your content creation time in half, whilst ensuring that what you’re putting out there is high quality and consistent. You can then concentrate on what you do best and generating more sales.
