When a brand has a robust social presence, even non-fans know about it.
Take Wendy’s, for example, a fast-food chain that was largely known for its burgers and shakes before it took to X (formerly known as Twitter) and tweeted in a witty, relatable tone. The brand quickly became known for roasting McDonald’s, replying to customers with snappy one-liners, and showing up unexpectedly in comments. In the span of a year, Wendy’s gained nearly one million followers and became not just a restaurant, but a personality.
A sassy tone might not work for every brand, but strategy, consistency, and a unique point of view can make a lasting impression on and off social media platforms. Here’s why it’s important to have a social media presence and how to build one for your business.
Why is it important to have a social media presence?
Social media presence is the prevalence of your brand on social media platforms and the connection you have with your audience. There are several benefits to having a strong social media presence:
Reliable marketing channel
When you build a strong social presence for your business, you have a reliable, direct line to your target audience. It can take some effort to build an audience, but once you do, it’s relatively inexpensive to maintain it, especially compared to paid advertising.
Measurable results
Compared to traditional marketing tactics—such as billboards and TV commercials—it’s relatively easy to measure progress on social media. By looking at social media metrics like the numbers of likes, shares, and comments on social media posts, you can easily see which content resonates with your audience and which doesn’t.
Learning opportunities
When you actively engage with your audience, you learn about their preferences and priorities. Through your social media accounts, you can ask questions, get customer feedback, and test new ideas. Gathering these audience insights—and acting on them—will strengthen your brand’s presence in the long run.
How to build your social media presence
- Research your audience
- Focus on a platform or two
- Refine your social brand identity
- Be consistent
- Actively engage with the platform
- Adapt to surprises
To build the best social media presence you can for your business and grow your audience organically, start with these tips:
1. Research your audience
Understand your audience’s preferences to build the foundation for the rest of your social media strategy.
Knowing whether your target audience is generally younger or older, urban or rural, budget-conscious or affluent will help you determine what kinds of content to serve them and where.
Do they value high-quality images or inspiring stories? Knowing their preferences, habits, and pain points will help you determine where and how to cater to them.
Tools like Shopify Audiences can help you determine the groups most likely to respond to your brand.
2. Focus on a platform or two
It may sound counterintuitive if your end goal is to build a social presence that extends well beyond one social media platform, but you’ll maximize your efforts by focusing on one or two. Where your target market spends the most time will dictate the right platforms for you.
Explore these options and the audiences they tend to cater to:
- TikTok. TikTok primarily serves younger social media users (ages 18 to 34) and niche audiences, thanks to an algorithm that’s highly adept at serving relevant content.
- YouTube. More than a video hosting platform, YouTube caters to Gen Z, millennial, and Gen X audiences looking for community, entertainment, and educational content.
- Facebook. Facebook followers tend to engage with local, community-focused brands because the social network has features like check-ins and reviews that benefit brick-and-mortar stores.
- Instagram. Instagram casts a wide net in terms of user age, but its focus on aesthetically pleasing visual content makes it especially appealing to those interested in fashion, travel, food, and lifestyle content.
- LinkedIn. More than half of LinkedIn users are 25 to 34 years old, and working professionals looking for helpful content, networking opportunities, and valuable insights that can aid their businesses and careers.
- X (formerly known as Twitter). With its reputation as a microblogging platform, X is great for engaging with news junkies, journalists, trend-savvy young adults, and public figures.
3. Refine your social brand identity
It’s hard to have a competitive edge if you look and sound like all your competitors. Conduct a competitive analysis and refine your brand voice and visual identity so that it’s unique and easily recognizable across social media channels.
Craft brand guidelines that dictate the colors, words, and fonts you use along with your brand’s point of view on the world and approach to common situations. For example, if you find that most of your competitors have adopted a lofty, inspirational tone and neutral color palette, you might experiment with a lighthearted, playful tone and bright, colorful palette to stand out.
Note that your brand’s personality might be more casual on social media than it is in other contexts. Duolingo is a famous example of a language learning app that takes a friendly, straightforward tone in its product but a mischievous tone on TikTok. Adapt your brand’s identity to the social channels of your choosing so you can build an emotional connection with your customers.
📖Read more: Stand out in the Market With Distinct Brand Identity Design
4. Be consistent
Plan a content calendar a month or quarter out to ensure you’ll have enough content to remain top of mind. Develop a posting schedule that you can maintain while still showing up regularly in potential customers’social media feeds. Aim to build a social media calendar that posts three to five times a week on your main social media profiles and leaves room for a quick video, image, or meme responding to an emerging trend.
Reposting user-generated content (UGC), or photos and videos that your audience creates and tags you in, serves the dual purpose of posting regularly and engaging with your followers.
5. Actively engage with the platform
It’s not enough to post videos and images. To build your social media presence, it’s essential to respond to comments, mentions, and direct messages and jump on trending hashtags. Actively engaging with your audience and hopping on emerging trends encourages both existing and new audiences to engage with you.
Engaging existing audiences is a big part of providing excellent customer service. Answering questions, sharing social proof, and thanking customers for positive reviews lets them know they’re valued. Even negative comments and customer complaints represent an opportunity for you to bolster your brand reputation, so long as you promptly respond to those complaints with solutions. When customers see your brand values in action, it fosters brand loyalty.
For engaging new audiences, it’s all about responding to cultural and industry trends authentically. Use the trend to tell your brand’s story and create content that injects your unique point of view into the broader conversation. For example, if you own a sustainable clothing brand with a witty brand voice, you could offer to help a celebrity offset their environmental impact when they are in the news for taking a 20-minute private jet ride.
6. Adapt to surprises
Over the course of building your social presence, you may have hypotheses about what will work or what won’t. Be open to changing your approach when you find that an offbeat post you created on a whim goes viral or customers share a new use for your product. Use social media management tools to track performance and gain insights, then use those insights to inform targeted campaigns.
The most effective social media strategy is one that adapts to cultural shifts, fluctuations in customer loyalty, and policy changes on social media networks.
Businesses with strong social media presences
Explore these prime examples of how you can use engaging content to build both your business and social presence:
Royalty Soaps
Katie Carson is the business owner and content creator behind Royalty Soaps, a handcrafted soap company. Katie started by documenting her soap-making journey on her YouTube channel, where she posted how-to guides, reviews of other brands’ soaps, and behind-the-scenes videos of her small operation. Her approachable, energetic tone resonated with the soap-making community. “The growth was rapid after that, far bigger than I could have ever anticipated,” Katie says. “It was very, very fun and very surprising.”
Now, Royalty Soaps has nearly one million YouTube subscribers and an actively engaged customer base.
loungefit.
Loungefit., an activewear company founded by Andre Smith, gained a large TikTok presence by posting unfiltered, behind-the-scenes content. Rather than listing the benefits of his products, Andre showed what it was like to be a small business owner—including the highs and the lows. This level of authenticity deeply resonated with TikTok’s users.
“Initially, 80% of my sales came from TikTok,” Andre says, “and [posts] wouldn’t have to be me promoting the product. It could just be me doing a day-in-the-life video where people like the outfit [I’m] wearing.”
Mejuri
Noura Sakkijha, the founder of the fine jewelry brand Mejuri, always wanted to highlight the beauty of diversity in Mejuri’s content. The brand’s main social media account on Instagram has accumulated over 1.2 million followers by showcasing the people as much as the jewelry.
“The key belief for me is wanting—when people hear Mejuri—to think the face of the brand is our community,” Noura says. “And so that’s true then if you look at our social media, the diversity there—it’s driven our partnerships with content creators. It’s driven by how we contextualize our products.”
By leveraging the platform’s preference for aesthetically pleasing, visual content and partnering with like-minded creators, Mejuri built a brand that sells its products as much as its values.
Social media presence FAQ
Why is a social media presence important?
Brands need to have a strong social media presence because modern audiences spend a significant amount of time on social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Having a strong social presence increases brand visibility and allows you to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences—all of which can have a direct impact on brand loyalty and sales.
How do you make a presence on social media?
Build a presence by researching your target audience, focusing on one or two social media platforms at first, crafting a unique brand tone, posting regularly, engaging with your audience, and adapting your social media strategy to cultural shifts.
How long does it take to build a social media presence?
It depends on how aggressively you pursue your goals, but if you’re posting regularly and actively engaging with your followers, you should start seeing initial engagement and growth in six months. It can then take a year or more to build a robust and influential social media presence that extends beyond the platform.
