Where Start-Ups Fail: Visual Social Media Brand Design

Presenting your brand consistently across all marketing platforms is a critical part of transforming your business into an extraordinary brand, and social media branding is becoming more important every day.

As social media sites continue to grow in popularity, often the very first interaction a person has with your brand is through a site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Pinterest.

With social media you present your brand in different ways – the two most common are in the written word and the visual design.

The written word encompasses everything you write on and post to social media sites, including your profile information and bio, your status updates, and your comments, replies, retweets, likes, etc. It is imperative that the written voice of your brand be “on message” and consistent throughout all of the social media sites you are active in.

The visual design encompasses the visual look of your brand on social media sites. Some social sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube primarily, let you customize elements of your profile, page, or channel with your brand color palette, graphics, and message, helping you create a consistent, powerful, extraordinary brand that is remembered, respected, and referred.

The visual social media brand design is where I see many start-up businesses fail. They aren’t yet making money (or making the money they want), so they cut corners to save a few bucks and skip investing in their social media brand design.

But that’s a problem! As I mentioned before, often the very first interaction a person has with your brand is through a social media site. If you do not have a branded presence on these sites, you’re instantly making it harder for new people to do business with you! Why? Because you’re making them work to recognize, remember, or figure out who you are!

With a custom, branded social media design strategy, you create a consistent look and feel for your brand that matches your website, email marketing, and print marketing materials. This enhances your professionalism, reinforces your expert status, and builds your credibility and trust.

Your social media brand design should include at minimum:

• A custom branded Twitter Background
• A custom branded YouTube Background
• A custom Branded Facebook Timeline Cover Image and coordinating avatar

To really knock it out of the park, your social media brand design strategy should also include:

• Custom designed Facebook Milestone images
• Custom designed Facebook pages with custom application images
• A single Avatar image that is used on all social media sites and is registered at Gravatar.com to accelerate the recognition/know factor

Here’s what you’ll need to do get started:

1. Confirm whether or not you want to include your logo. I know it sounds like a crazy question to ask (we include our logo), but occasionally we have a client who doesn’t want to include it in their social media designs.
2. Decide what photo you want to use for your social media backgrounds and images. While some will use different photos on each social media site, we recommend you use the same photo on all of them – and the same photo should be found on your website too.
3. Finalize the content you want to include in the backgrounds / images. Remember, less is more! Remember, you don’t have much space and people don’t have time to read a bunch of content. Just make sure you include your website address. Hint: The URL doesn’t have to be your homepage. I could be a URL for a special offer or a special landing page tailored to those who click-through from a specific social media site.
4. It is against Facebook’s rules to include any specific calls to action in your timeline cover image, but Twitter and YouTube have no such rules. So think about whether or not you want to include a short call to action in your background designs.
5. Not quite sure what to use for a milestone image? Some ideas include the day you started your business, the launch of your website, the launch of a product, a live event, a virtual event, the hire of an employee, a special award or recognition, or a major accomplishment.

Creating a consistent brand for your business through social media will reinforce your credibility, your dependability, and your expert status. It will also make your prospects take notice, and your brand stand out from the crowd.