The Role of Social Media in Building Brand Authority
Does your business have brand authority? It’s an important question when considering your business’s place in today’s highly saturated markets. Regardless of your industry, competition has never been tougher. That’s because most industries are operating in a digital marketplace through social media. Savvy customers and savvy businesses alike are online, constantly connecting with one another, building relationships, and establishing trust.
Your business’s brand authority is what your audience and customers know and trust about your brand. Whether you sell coffee in a local neighbourhood or offer services to customers around the world, your audience has to know and trust your brand. This is where utilizing social media becomes a critical key to success.
Luckily, there are tools that make creating and posting content easier than ever. You can put AI to work for you to create high quality, credible, and engaging social media content that presents your brand to the world in a consistent and compelling way. Tools like SocialPost.ai can streamline your social media process, making it easier than ever to develop an audience, build brand authority, and draw the right leads to your business.
What is brand authority?
Like people, brands come with personalities, and audiences interact with those personalities at a variety of touch points (online, physical locations, service reps, etc.). Over time, we begin to associate certain characteristics with brands. Think about the difference between a bank’s personality compared to a tech company; a local gym compared to a spa; or a dessert shop and a smoothie bar.
When brands build a consistent image and personality over time, audiences begin to know and trust that brand’s authority. That consistency is what separates one business from another, and what makes certain brands instantly recognizable. Nike in sportswear, Apple in tech—these are examples of some of the world’s most recognizable brands.
Part of that instant recognition is that these brands have worked over time to build consistent, reliable, trustworthy brand representations that remain true to themselves. If one of these well-known brands began to post things that felt off-brand, audiences would be quick to notice. That’s because brand awareness is just that—an awareness that the brand exists. Brand authority, on the other hand, builds certain expectations with the audience over time.
When brands can consistently show up, position themselves as experts or leaders, and meet the expectations of their audiences and customers, they are successfully building brand authority that will serve them along their business’s journey.
Today’s digital world makes it easier than ever to build a consistent brand authority over time. The flip side is that audiences are also expecting more than they ever have. Although a lot of work goes into running successful social media channels, posting online and maintaining a strong social media presence can appear to be easy—everyone has a phone, right?
Audiences expect brands to be online, posting regularly, and engaging with their customers. Failure to do this in a meaningful way that resonates with your audience’s expectations can create a lack of brand authority, even if your business is excellent at what it does. This is why social media can’t be relegated to the bottom of a to-do list, even for extremely busy business owners.
Use social media to build brand authority
Social media has the potential to be a business’s number one tool for building brand authority. That’s because it offers your brand a platform to showcase what you do, how you do it, and who your offerings are for. It also creates an opportunity for two-way communication in the form of comments, messages, and other online engagements.
Social media is unlike other branded touch points because of this two-way communication. Like most things online, this can be a catch-22. If your business is responsive to your online audience by replying to comments and messages, this can go a long way towards improving brand authority. On the other hand, if you post online but are otherwise absent when your audience engages, this can work against you.
Communicating with audiences online has to be on-brand as well. Consider the online persona that Wendy’s has developed. The brand has become known for their quips and out-of-pocket replies to comments and online engagement. The result is a more humanized and accessible brand. Audiences follow along just to see what Wendy’s will say next, even if they’re not a fan of their burgers.
Creating and posting regular content alone can be a lot of work for business owners. Luckily, online tools makes it easier to automate social media posts and leave more room for these other tasks, which might require more time and attention.
By delegating out the tasks that can be completed by AI digital tools, you’ll be accomplishing two things: the first is building a consistent brand authority by posting regular, high-value content that speaks to your existing audience while continuing to attract new leads.
The second is that you’ll free up crucial time spent on social media to dedicate to engaging with messages, comments, and questions. You may even want to take a leaf out of Wendy’s playbook and interact with other business’s or user’s social media accounts to further develop your brand authority. This may or may not fit with your business’s branding—there may be other ways of engaging with your online community.
Regardless, the importance of social media as a way to build your business’s brand authority can’t be overstated. If your business is on social media, or if you’re looking at reevaluating your brand’s presence online, remember that each post and interaction matters. A strategy that includes automation can pave the way to seamless growth, while relying on manual posting can take up many hours, and a lot of energy that’s required elsewhere.
Creating high-value content, and posting consistently
One of the most important components of building brand authority on social media is posting consistently. Inconsistent posting may work against you more than not posting at all, because not posting is, at least, consistent. If your brand is on social media, it’s crucial that your followers and audiences are hearing from you on a regular basis.
When audiences see regular content posted consistently over time, they become more familiar with your brand and are more likely to trust you with their business. It might not seem like it always translates—why does a local restaurant need to prioritize posting, when the more important components of the business might be the food or the service?—but regularly posting communicates that you are present and reliable, two characteristics that poise your business as an authority.
While it may once have been enough simply to post just about anything, today’s audiences expect more. They are looking for high quality content on a regular basis. This means that your social media posts should always be contributing something valuable, whether it’s information, inspiration, education, or entertainment. Audiences scroll on social media to gain something, so it’s important to remember why you’re posting. It’s easy to forget that social media isn’t just a marketing platform. It’s a place to connect with audiences, and give them what they’re looking for.
If the idea of coming up with high quality content ideas, as well as creating that content and posting is, sounds like a lot of work—it is. But it doesn’t have to be fall entirely onto you as the business owner, or onto your team. Social media automation tools like SocialPost.ai make it easier than ever to delegate hours of social media content creation to AI, leaving you with more time to focus on the rest of your day and other components of your marketing strategy.
Digital tools can cut down on the amount of time it takes to brainstorm and create great, high value content—the kind of content that audiences are expecting to see. It might not be reasonable for audiences to expect small businesses to do it all, but regardless, that’s the nature of the current digital landscape. With tools like SocialPost.ai, you can do it all, because you’re not doing it alone.
That means it’s easier than ever to create quality content, post consistently, and continue to develop your brand authority.
Engage with your audience online (without it taking over your schedule)
As we’ve discussed, engaging with audiences on social media can be one of the biggest factors in improving your brand authority. Replying to messages, inquiries, comments, and user generated content shows your potential customers that you are present and responsive. This is something you can convey even if you rely on automating some of your responses and engagement.
Although real-time conversations can be necessary on social media, often, customers are asking similar questions. That means you can work with automated responses in many instances. If these responses are well-thought out, and used with discretion, you can save time while assuring your customer that they’re being heard and connecting directly with your business.
This consistent response to customers can make a huge difference when it comes to your brand authority, often making just as much impact as regular posting alone. By showing up for your audience’s questions and providing an open line of communication, particularly one that works through channels they are already familiar with, you’re demonstrating your willingness to meet customers where they are. This goes a long way to establishing trust, reliability, and authority.
The importance of engaging with your audience on social media can’t be overstated. If you don’t have the time or resources to respond to followers online, then you may want to consider whether you’re ready to start social media accounts. The same way that a business’s website, bricks and mortar store, or online shop has to meet a certain standard that aligns with audience expectations, social media is a place where people expect to be able to engage.
Ensuring that you are responsive to followers on social media is just as important as posting to begin with. When posting, you can expect engagement to spike. Again, you can reduce the amount of time spent coming up with replies by working with automation tools that quickly address customers’ most common questions.
You can also take it a step further by making frequently asked questions part of your brand’s content, and using it to inspire your posts and other content. If customers ask a particular question once or twice a month, an automated reply can work well. If customers are asking the same question on a daily basis, it’s time to make that information more accessible and clear on your platforms.
Beyond that, sharing user-generated content, testimonials, and reviews can encourage a sense of community and a sense of responsiveness that go a long way towards establishing your brand authority.
Build thought leadership through social media
Being a thought leader in your industry is one of the most powerful way to set your business apart in the marketplace. Thought leaders are looked towards for expertise in niche subjects, and establishing your brand as a leader in your area is a reliable way to ensure that you are constantly attracting new customers, as well as retaining your existing ones.
What exactly does it mean to be a thought leader?
On social media, this can look like taking all the experience and insight you’ve gained while building your business and translating it into information and content that highlights best practices. As a business owner, you’ve undoubtedly learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. This can look like specifically like content that demonstrates how you run your business, and why you’ve chosen that approach.
More broadly, however, being a thought leader allows you to have an impact on a variety of audiences. If you have experience working with B2B clients, then what you’ve learned in your work will likely apply to other B2B businesses, even if they’re not in the same industry. Sharing your insights, experience, and tried and true lessons in the form of social media content firmly positions you as a leader in your work.
In addition to building a following, you are also speaking directly to new potential clients who may not even be in the market for your services—yet. Seeing your content will go a long way towards helping them understand why the work you do is important, and why you’re the person to do it. Many successful business owners make use of LinkedIn articles to share their expertise, and as a result they are able to build global followings and attract exactly the type of customer or client that they are most interested in working with.
Use visual storytelling to leverage your brand
A social media post is worth a thousands words—that’s because social media is almost always a visual-first medium. Social media users are quickly moving through online content, and anything with a high quality image will always get more engagements and views than something with a low quality image, or worse, no image at all.
Even on sites like LinkedIn or Facebook where posting text alone is possible, it’s not recommended. Social media visuals are important real estate for sharing important information. Even images with text in them can convey a message more quickly and in a more attractive fashion than text alone.
Consider things like infographics, high-res images, and videos in your regular content rotation. High quality, interesting, and value-rich images are a key component of great content. Your audience is much more likely to trust your brand if you’re putting in the time to create high quality content. Subconsciously, we associate well-thought-out images that grab our attention with a brand’s ability to deliver in other ways.
If a business puts in the time to tell their visual story, they must know what they’re doing—or so your audience believes.
How SocialPost.ai can help build brand authority
Creating high quality content and posting consistently doesn’t have to take up all your time as a business owner.
By utilizing automation tools like SocialPost.ai, you can outsource your content creation and posting while you focus on other tasks. SocialPost.ai is there to create and post high quality content, contributing to your business’s brand authority by maintaining a consisting posting schedule, creating relevant content that your audiences want to see, and supporting you in replying and engaging with your audience online.
As a business owner, you don’t have to commit full time effort to get full time results, nor do you have to have a team of social media pros on your team.
SocialPost.ai is free to use and doesn’t require a credit card, which means you can get started today. It’s an ideal solution for businesses that are starting out, growing quickly, or looking for a social media refresh. It’s never too late to begin posting like a pro when you use social media post automation.
Get started today and begin to build your business’s brand authority easily, consistently, and best of all—automatically.
