SURBHI GOSAIN
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Social media has become the most crucial part of any branding strategy. Thus, it is important to learn how to use social media for one’s own advantage to gain a competitive advantage over others. It helps in building brand identity and market positioning, as it is an effective tool for communicating the mission, vision, and corporate values of an organization in the most effective way using different styles and tones. Programs like PGDM and PGDM(IB) at JIMS Kalkaji equip students with a deep understanding of how to effectively tailor their social media communications for building a brand.
Branding in social media is about creating consistent visual identities, such as logos, tones, and colours, across various platforms. The main aim is to increase visibility and create a connection with different stakeholders. This can be achieved using the art of storytelling. It often helps to engage with an audience by way of storytelling, highlighting innovation, future prospects, current projects, and workplace culture aligned with their corporate values. An important aspect of using social media for brand building is consumer engagement and community building. The engagement via social media is not just constrained to responding to comments and feedback but also ranges to hosting polls, contests, and live sessions with the consumers. This is an effective way of engaging with the customers and thereby building a community. For example, Zomato uses witty engagement to strengthen their brand personality in the form of their app notifications.
Social media enables an organization to reflect their industrial insights and thoughtful leadership qualities to give a glimpse of values supported by the brand when it comes to their stakeholders. For example, companies like Tata Group use their social media accounts to emphasize their corporate values of trust and legacy through effective storytelling while communicating their CSR initiatives. Likewise, senior leaders, such as founders and CEOs, use their LinkedIn accounts to publish their insights on future trends, distinctive practices, and the company’s position. This helps in maintaining visibility and strengthening the position of the organization. Not just the founders and CEOs, but also the employees of a company also use social media platforms to endorse their organizations and advocate for shared values. Often employees are witnessed posting about their workplace culture on their Instagram account, reflecting the working environment of an organization. Any content that is in alignment with the corporate values of the company allows the prospective pool of talent to see what the organization means to their current employees, thereby building a positive brand image for the organization.
Every organization has to deal with crisis communication and reputation management in case the need arises. Social media not only allows an organization to promote their content and brand values, but social media handles can also be used for managing crises and the way companies can act for reputation management. Social media provides an immediate response facility to the organizations while responding to any controversy or negative publicity. In such situations the companies can release an immediate statement addressing the issue. Time is considered crucial in case of managing crises, as a gap in communication can magnify the adversity of the crisis. It also offers transparent and clarified posts and real-time updates to the consumers and other stakeholders.
When it comes to social media, influencers and strategic collaborations are also considered key factors while promoting corporate brands. So, partnering with the influencers and content creators aligned with the brand values and co-creating branded campaigns is an effective way of building a corporate brand. Social media helps an organization to expand their brand reach. Therefore, a clear branding framework is required to define a brand voice, tone, and content guidelines to align the brand values with all collaborated posts and campaigns promoted on the social media handles of a company, and if a company is collaborating, then the collaborated post needs to follow the brand voice and guidelines as well. This helps in maintaining the platform-wise consistency and aligns content with a corporate strategy.
Social media also enables an organization to make data-driven decisions and monitor the outcome of their strategy. Options such as monitored KPIs, engagement rate, reach and impressions, conversion rates, and brand sentimental analysis can be performed for posts and campaigns. This enables a company to have data-driven decision-making while creating their content strategies and promotional strategies for different campaigns without wasting their resources. Social media nowadays also provides the facilities of automation, where a company can schedule well in advance what campaigns they will be running and when and hence pre-schedule the posts. Thematic weekly campaigns are another effective strategy where the brands can adopt different themes in different weeks or according to the festivities and seasons, where they can have more engagement with consumers.
Now let us understand how different social media platforms can be used for different brand-building initiatives. Instagram helps in visual branding of an organization, while X (formerly known as Twitter) is effective for providing real-time updates. YouTube can be used for long storytelling. Whereas LinkedIn is more professionally aligned and meant for industry interactions. Every organization needs to understand that posting content that is not relevant for the audience of a particular social media platform can lead to purposeless posts and dilute the communication strategy.
Therefore, learning to use social media for one’s brand-building initiative is essential in the present scenario where competition is intensified and information moves at a rapid pace. Social media can be leveraged from creating an impact in the minds of the people to being the voice of the organization during the time of crisis.
