Whether you want to sell out your products, gain new subscribers, or even want to influence followers to your brand and its message, they've got to identify your presence and importance.

Encouraging loyalty stems from a strong brand's authority and social media marketing can be the catalyst to enhancing brand identity and image. An E-consultancy report shows about 71 percent of brands wanted to invest in social media, to expand reach and rope in new followers thus building brand reputation.

Source: Business Insider
Source: Business Insider

Here are some social media marketing tips that can expand on social sharing and social media channel use in setting up a brand

  • Select Networks That Aid Brand Image

According to the stats in Convince and Convert, 22 percent of Americans use social media channels several times every day that makes it the right platform to build a brand. But one should choose the right social media channel from the hundreds of channels swarming on the web. The channels need to support the brand image.

Facebook has been by and large the best platform for promoting brand awareness as most Americans use the site. It has a heterogeneous user base that works to a huge advantage. Similarly Instagram is a good channel for retailers and effective in targeting the youth and African Americans.

Google+ also can be a great platform to rope in the technical guys, especially those from the engineering field. Pinterest works for brands selling jewelry or clothing. Finally, LinkedIn is a strong social media platform for B2B companies and for connecting with corporate influencers.

  • Provide Shareable Content And Create Social Campaigns For Promotions

Brand reputation can be enhanced if the focus is on creating useful content related to your offerings that viewers will share owing to its usefulness. Churning out generic content can do no good on social media. Each line of content should support the brand image indirectly. Do resist the temptation of creating click bait strategies that will even ruin the brand in the long run.

Focus on content that will help you drive social media traffic to your brand's site. Images work better than blog posts but to know that, analytics will play an important role.

Articles with images always land about 94 percent more views than textual content while Twitter boasts of better engagement with visual content than text posts, too leading to seven times more visual content on the channel.

Always check out what the competitors are doing to gain good social traction. Do not build content on unproven topics but rely on competitor's list of techniques and compile your own with much more depth on the same.

Tools such as BuzzSumo can help companies to know the sort of articles that work and are popular on the web. Also paid campaigns running on native advertising platforms are good ones to build a brand on social networks. Devise contests and other engaging social media strategy checklist for achieving visibility and generate useful leads.

  • Leverage the right influencers

Publishing killer content is an integral part of the equation but when you have an unknown brand, your voice will not make much of an impact and not pull a good deal of audience in a jiffy.

A faster approach is to leverage existing influencers in the industry. One can cite the influencer's websites in your self-generated content pieces or tag them when sharing content to diverse social media profiles.

Email them after the content is published to let them know about their name being referenced. It does take time to build up any sort of relationship with an influencer through social sharing and social media channels, but one needs to be consistent in creating quality content, and then in involving related influencers in the loop too. These influencers can in turn, help you expand your brand reach to their followers too.

David Milsont