Social Media Branding: How to Engage Customers With Your Personal Narrative

Building a personal brand on social media takes strategy. Learn how to choose your niche, create unique content, pick which platforms to post on, and analyze data to build an emotional connection with your audience.

Key takeaways

• Learn how to choose your niche skill set and create detailed buyer personas to shape relevant content.
• Discover the best social platforms to post on based on your goals, audience, and content formats.
• Find out how to craft a consistent visual identity with branded colors, graphics, and images for better recognition.
• See why continuously tracking performance data is important for optimizing content and engagement.

If you’re a professional with a product or service, you might be thinking something along the lines of "I hear my personal narrative can help engage current and potential customers, but how do I tell my story in a way that will help my business? How do I tell it authentically while also using it to engage with my customer base?" 

If you want to use your personal story to connect with people on social media more organically, you need to develop a strategic, consistent brand presence across multiple platforms. This requires intention, effort, and a focused approach, but crafting a strong personal brand on social media will help you stand out from competitors, attract ideal clients, and build credibility. 

So, let’s explore tangible steps to build your brand online by defining your niche skills, creating valuable content, choosing the right platforms, and continually tracking performance. 

Define your personal brand strategy

Before publishing any new content, establish clarity on your core brand identity and objectives.

Spend time classifying the niche skills, experiences, and perspectives that make you uniquely qualified to serve a specific audience. Get ultra-focused on precisely what value you offer. 

For example, chef Jenny Dorsey strategically built her personal brand around "using food to express human emotions” and uses her website and social channels to personally connect with people using her story.  

Vulnerably sharing your origin story and background helps audiences emotionally connect with you, your motivations, and the passion you have for your work. Outline your personal journey and the “why” behind what you do so followers can relate to you as a real person beyond your work. You can do this by:

• Sharing defining moments that shaped your path to provide context and build trust.
• Spotlighting mentors or role models who impacted your trajectory.
• Discussing early career struggles and lessons learned on your journey.

You will also want to create detailed buyer personas representing your ideal clients so that you can tailor content to their goals and pain points. For example, if you’re a fashion designer, you might define specific personas like “the trendy social media maven” and “the fashionable career woman” to create relevant content for each. 

Now, let’s get into choosing the social media platforms that are best for you. 

Choose your social media platforms strategically

To choose the right social media platforms to post on, you’ll want to conduct thorough research on each platform's audience demographics, features, culture, advertising options, and analytics to determine where your target audience already spends time online. Then, identify three to five platforms where your audience's needs and behaviors align with your brand goals around community engagement, content formats, and growth.

For example, professional speaker, Jay Shetty, focuses his efforts on Instagram and Facebook where his highly visual content thrives, given that those platforms prioritize images and videos that his followers respond to. 

Be strategic in cross-referencing your audience’s needs with the platforms that can best advance your objectives. Do this by: 

• Prioritizing platforms where your audience is already active to increase discoverability.
• Considering emerging platforms like TikTok or Clubhouse, where opportunities exist to establish authority in a niche.
• Analyzing each platform's advertising options if paid campaigns are part of your strategy.

Buffer offers this comprehensive guide for a detailed breakdown of potential social media platforms you could use and their demographics. Now, let’s dive into social media branding techniques for crafting a visual identity. 

Craft your visual brand identity

Crafting a compelling personal narrative online is not only about what you say but how your assets look. A consistent visual identity will lead to better brand recognition by your audience. 

To achieve an alluring, consistent visual brand identity, create visual components like color schemes, logos, graphics, and banners that communicate your brand quickly and consistently across platforms. 

For example, lifestyle blogger, Jean Wang, of Extra Petite defined a soft, feminine color palette with specific accent colors and font pairings that make her content instantly recognizable.

Design visually cohesive profile images, highlight covers, and other graphics, so users immediately know it’s your brand before even reading your name. Consider elements like YouTube channel art or LinkedIn banner images as valuable real estate to reinforce your visual identity. Other tips include: 

• Maintain image quality and style consistency – don’t stretch images or drastically filter some over others. Hootsuite offers a helpful guide to creating stunning images for social media.
• Review visual identity annually as your brand evolves to keep an updated, professional look.
• Design seasonal or campaign-specific graphics that align with your overall visual identity.

Creating a visual brand identity helps provide value to your audience with compelling UX elements. Let’s get into how providing value can build your community. 

Build your community by providing value

Social media has the word “social” in it for a reason – it’s not a platform to simply advertise yourself on. You want to provide value to people by offering useful advice, insights, and education through detailed posts and videos focused on your niche. Repost credible third-party content like relevant research and articles to showcase that you're plugged into what's new in your industry.

A great way to engage current and potential customers is to incentivize user-generated content like genuine reviews and testimonials to incorporate outside credibility. For example, restaurants often repost customers’ food photos while software companies share their users’ quotes and pictures. 

Creating content that connects with your audience is key to building a strong rapport. Let’s look at how to do that further. 

Strategically create and curate content

Sharing your brand's origin story in an authentic, relatable way will build trust and emotional connections. For instance, take actress, Jessica Alba, who launched The Honest Company with a story based on her struggles to find safe, non-toxic baby products as a new mom. A lot of parents can relate to this. 

Identify the topics and formats that resonate most with your audience and align with your goals. Repurpose and update evergreen content around popular topics so you can balance promoting new content while ensuring your best pieces remain discoverable.

• Experiment with different content lengths to see what your audience prefers and has time for.
• Get personal by sharing your insights or behind-the-scenes access to build authenticity.
• Leverage trends and current events related to your niche to create relevant content.
• Beef up your engagement by discovering the top-performing hashtags for your space and incorporating key phrases into hashtags for maximum reach.

Having a social media branding strategy will help you in using your personal narrative to connect with people. But, how do you know your content is working for you? 

Track performance to continually optimize

To understand if what you’re doing is actually working, leverage each social platform's built-in analytics to identify your highest-performing content based on impressions, clicks, engagement, follows, shares, and more. Reviewing insights regularly is important to determine peak posting times when your audience is most active and responsive.

Engagement can wane if you post the same type of content over and over. Keep experimenting with new topics and formats while phasing out those that underperform. Try these tips that social media influencers swear by:

• Track engagement metrics on each post, such as likes, comments, shares, etc., and note which topics tend to perform best. Use tools like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and X (Twitter) Analytics to identify when your followers are most active. Maybe you’ll learn that your followers are most active during weekday mornings, for example, so you schedule Instagram stories and posts during those high-traffic times.

• To provide variety, experiment with new content formats like IGTV videos, carousels, or Instagram Reels. 

• Collaborate with other influencers in your niche to cross-promote content and expand your audience. Lots of influencers do this to “cross worlds” with like-minded influencers which delights audiences who usually follow both. 

Let ContentBacon help you craft your personal narrative with tasty, custom content 

When you can naturally connect with your target audience on social media, you boost customer acquisition, retention, and long-term brand loyalty. 

By nurturing relationships and letting your personality and passion shine in posts, you can establish an authentic personal brand that showcases your talents and forges genuine bonds with supporters who will stick with you for the long haul. 

To connect with people on social media, you’ll need a creative strategy and stellar posts to keep your audience engaged. At ContentBacon, we help people connect to their audiences with outstanding content! Get in touch with our team today to let us do the heavy lifting.