How to Establish a Strong Social Media Brand Personality | Social Media Marketing Toronto Tips
Brand Personality is the way a brand represents and expresses itself. It is the driving force behind consumers’ decisions to follow a company on social media and to contact the business. It also enables businesses to make meaningful connections with consumers, which is important to sales and social media marketing success. Without it, businesses will have difficulty maintaining a competitive advantage and staying relevant.
If you already established a recognizable business, there is a good chance that you have already cultivated a brand personality. If you haven’t yet created your identity or are looking to improve (or change), keep reading this informative blog post which offers tips on how to establish a social media brand presence and highlights success stories that are worth emulating.
Five Types of Social Media Brand Personalities
Brands can have a variety of personality types. The following five dimensions of brand personalities were developed by Jennifer Aaker, an American social psychologist, author and General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business (source: Wikipedia).
• Excitement
• Sincerity
• Ruggedness
• Competence
• Sophistication
“Excitement” Dimension
Traits associated with this dimension are as follows:
• Daring
• Spirited
• Imaginative
Brands that have “Excitement” characteristics are known to create buzz and excitement for their customers.
For example, we can see how Coca Cola is maintaining a strong connection with their customers and engaging their target audience through a strong brand voice on social media.
(source: medium.com)
Coca-Cola is an excellent example of a brand that successfully delivers its marketing messages throughout the world and is known as a “young personality” brand. The concepts of happiness and joy are consistently and predominantly displayed in all their advertising and social media platforms.
In the “Share a Coke” campaign, Coca-Cola targeted its audience through a simple yet fun way – bottles which were personalized with popular names combined with terms of endearment. The goal of this campaign aimed to make consumers feel happy when they bought a bottle of Coca-Cola for their friends or family members with their names.
“Sincerity” Dimension
“Sincerity” is associated with the following traits:
• Down-to-earth
• Honest
• Cheerful
Brands with the “Sincerity” characteristics are known for genuineness and dedication.
One of the best examples of a brand that fit into the Sincerity dimension is Snickers. The chocolate bar brand uses social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter tool for posting funny content that not only includes their products but relates to trending news and current events. This generates lots of engagement and interest in both the company and the topics discussed.
Check out the two below posts to get insight into Snickers’ brand personality and how they connect their products to their target consumer. Both posts received a high number of engagements.
“Ruggedness” Dimension
These are brands known for their toughness and the appeal for the Outdoors and Nature. The ruggedness comes mainly from the nature of the product’s attributes which builds up the personality of those brands. The target audiences for brands with the “Ruggedness” dimension usually are young professionals, mainly 20 to 35 years old.
The North Face is an outdoor product company which has been in the market for a long time and is built on ruggedness. Their target audiences are people who enjoy doing outdoor activities such as rock climbing, extreme skiing, biking and hiking
(source: thenorthface.com)
“Competence” Dimension
The “Competence” dimension includes the following personality traits:
• Reliable
• Intelligent
• Successful
Brands with a competence brand personality are keen to demonstrate their commitment to quality and the impact their business is making on their industry. Competence brands also desire to establish themselves as industry leaders in the minds of consumers. They focus on producing products and services regularly that retain reliable quality. They also look to meet the needs of their customers by referencing their competitive advantage and what other businesses are not able to provide.
One of the brands that is associated with the “Competence” dimension is Microsoft. Microsoft uses social media platforms to drive their potential customers’ engagement and highlight the uniqueness of their innovations. For example, the company most recently used YouTube to promote its new Surface Duo. The ad clearly showed users what makes the tool different from its competitors, such as Apple iPad pro. The video garnered over 16K likes and 2.7 comments.
“Sophistication” Dimension
The “Sophistication” trait is the toughest one to achieve within the five main dimensions of brand personalities. Brands associated with “sophistication” are known as Elegant, Prestigious, and Sophisticated.
BMW and Tiffany are famous brands which primarily focus on the “sophistication” nature of the products and offer high-end and luxurious products.
If you visit one of the BMW’s pages on social media, the brand primarily aims to engage potential customers by publishing visually stunning and high-end images of vehicles.
Another example is Tiffany, one of the top luxury brands with more than 1.45 million followers on Twitter. Tiffany is using Twitter as a platform for updating potential customers on brand news and new product lines, responding to customer service inquiries, streaming real-time events and delivering its brand’s personality. The brand marketing voice on social media is witty and sophisticated. On Facebook, Tiffany also has more than 8 million followers.
5 Simple Ways to Build a Strong Brand Personality | Social Media Marketing GTA Tips
Know Your Audience. If you know who your potential customers are, keep them in mind when posting social media marketing content. They like you—and seek your insight —for good reason. They enjoy your knowledge and unique perspective on the things they like reading. So give it to them.
Optimize Your Bio. Regardless of the social media platform, your company bio (or about us section) is often the first thing users will read or notice. In 150 words or less, you want to carefully craft a message that explains who you are, includes key business information such as your industry, address, phone number, website and hours, and highlights your unique selling point.
Consistency is Key! Your colour scheme, brand voice and imagery should be kept uniform in style across all social media platforms. Maintaining consistency will heighten the personality of your brand and will make your brand immediately recognizable to audiences who are still getting to know you.
Take on a Point-of-View. Having one point of view does not necessarily mean that your brands need to be pushy and too salesy. What it does mean is that you as a content creator must believe in the content you create. You must also stick to the values that you used to establish your business. Because let’s face it, consumers love hearing other people’s opinions. These opinions are what makes you and your content newsworthy.
Be Open to Feedback. Not everyone is going to like you. And that’s quite alright. We live in a democratic world. What is not acceptable is to discard constructive (negative) feedback and not learning from it. Having and using a dynamic brand personality involves reaching out to audiences and consumers, responding to reviews (both positive and negative), writing a real response (not the generic “thanks for your feedback,”) about the challenges they faced or the ease of their experience.
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