Building Your Brand on Social Media Starts Here
If you’re an author, thought leader, or entrepreneur who is either brand-new to social media or trying to grow your online presence to promote your brand, it can be intimidating to figure out how to promote yourself and build a platform that amplifies your message. After all, how can you create the right content, enough content, and find your audience?
To help clarify the process of building a social media presence, we like to break it down like this: Great branding = Trust-building = Engagement. In other words, as you build a reliable brand by producing great content, you establish trust with your audience. As this trust grows, so will your following and engagement on your posts.
Stick around, and we’ll show you how to build your brand, earn your audience’s trust, and track engagement so you know your social media is on the right track.
Defining Your Brand for Social Media
Do you follow any pages that have great branding? Pages that feel cohesive, driven, and always deliver on providing watchable content? Their success started when they sat down to define their brand.
- What is the goal of our content (education, humor, etc.)?
- Who is our target audience (their interests, age, preferred content, etc.)?
- What topics are essential for our brand?
Once you answer these questions, you’ll have clarity on the type of content you should create and who you want to engage, which will build the foundation for how to market your book on social media.
Branding gives you a distinct voice and personality in a sea of pages that may cover the same or similar topics. As the Social Media Examiner says, “A distinctive personal brand helps professionals differentiate themselves in saturated markets . . . A personal brand with a unique perspective on your subject matter distinguishes you from others covering the same topics.”
Update Your Social Media Profiles According to Your Brand
Once you have defined your branding, the next step is to update your social media profiles. You should focus on:
- Your Profile Picture – Make it an accurate representation of who you are now.
- Your Cover Photo/Graphic (for Facebook and LinkedIn) – Here, you can share your book cover, services, credentials, etc.
- Your Bio – Bio length varies by platform, but you should mention your credentials, book, contact information, website, and your unique values (services, expertise, work, etc.).
Remember, your profile picture and bio are a big part of your audience’s first impression of you and your brand. As you build your social media presence (whether that be Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or all of the above), remember to keep your image consistent with your website and other online platforms. People shouldn’t receive different messages about who you are and what you do depending on the platform. Define your message, hone your offerings, and find your voice, then put it into practice to build your online brand.
A polished profile is essential for strong branding and the next step in building your social media presence: earning your audience’s trust.
Creating a Trustworthy Brand Keeps Your Audience Coming Back
A key step in building a trustworthy brand is seeing your profile as a way to build relationships with your audience, not just a platform to promote yourself. As Becky Robinson, the owner and founder of Weaving Influence, says, “I often tell clients that building followers is about building relationships. Focusing on authenticity and showing up as a real person online can help build connections and trust.”
For example, if you have a self-help book that uses a humorous worldview to encourage others, then that should be the angle of your content. Using self-deprecating humor, valuable life advice, and personal stories, combined with photos and videos, will shape your branding into a voice your audience trusts for humorous, relatable advice.
Do you see what happened there? By sharing insights from your book and life on topics you’re already passionate about, you can build trust with an audience that resonates with what you have to say and starts seeking advice in your content.
Trust Builds Community
Using social channels to share your brand message seems simple, but if you’re not careful, it can turn into self-promotion that doesn’t make an impact. Social media becomes powerful when a brand takes the time to nurture a genuine, interested, and enthusiastic community by building trust with followers.
It’s a rewarding process that takes effort, but it’s within your reach. After all, the fact that you’ve gotten this far shows you want to learn the most effective ways to promote your book and message on social media and are ready to put in the work to get there.
Tips for Building a Social Community
Add Value With Your Content – Remember, your page is about your followers, not you. People follow you because they find value and relevance in what you share. With so much noise on social media, make sure your content genuinely adds something helpful or interesting to their lives. Otherwise, they might scroll past. When writing social copy or making a video, consider what information or format will resonate the most and serve your followers.
Be Authentic – Social media is overwhelmed with cookie-cutter content, and people often put on a front instead of showing their true selves. That’s why it’s valuable to be your genuine self online. People want to connect with the real you: your challenges, your experiences, and your happy moments.
Ginelle Testa, author of Make a Home Out of You: A Memoir, explains that her openness about her addiction recovery and self-love journey on social media helped her profile grow: “I love sharing my journey [on social media], and being vulnerable is just part of my process.”
Engage With Your Followers – How do you engage people in conversation? That’s right, you ask questions. Take the same approach when building relationships on social media. Ask thoughtful, engaging questions, and you’ll receive thoughtful, engaging answers. You can do this by ending your video with a question, adding a poll to your post or Story, or encouraging your followers to post a question in your comments.
Give Your Audience a Voice – When you engage with your audience through comments, polls, and questions, you give them a voice. You are showing that you don’t want your platform to be a stage, but a safe, fun place where people can gather, interact with you, learn, laugh, and find answers to their questions.
Be Generous – When you see your time on social media as a chore or just a way to sell your brand, people will feel that lack of engagement. Instead, be generous with the time and effort you put into your social media presence so you can build an audience that trusts your consistency and commitment to building relationships.
Our Ideas for Getting Better Engagement on Social Media
Building a successful social media page also comes down to the quality of the content you share and how you use it to encourage responses from your audience. Here are four tried and true ways to get better engagement on your posts.
Post Photos and Videos – Humans are visual creatures. That’s why eye-catching photos and videos perform best on social media. One of our clients, Christian Greiser, saw firsthand the impact great content can have when we helped grow his Instagram following from 200 to 7,000 by creating authentic, selfie-style videos that opened his page to conversation with his community.
Ask Engaging Questions – Just as you don’t want your social media to be only about you and your brand, you also want to show your audience that you value their perspectives by asking engaging questions. You can do this by ending your video with a question, encouraging responses in the comments, or posting a poll.
Respond to Comments – Part of building a relationship with your community on social media is responding when they take the time to reach out. Always carve out time to offer thoughtful responses to comments and DMs because that is how you earn even greater trust and engagement with your audience.
Run Giveaways – A great way to build early interest in your book or services is to feature a giveaway, offering a free book or brief consultation for following you or sharing your post. As people share and promote your giveaway, it also puts you in front of new followers.
Keep Your Community Engaged So They Keep Coming Back
Think about a band you love that always makes music you enjoy. Because you like them so much, you want to be the first to know when new music drops and where they’ll be touring. You sign up for their emails, visit their website regularly, and stream their new music the moment it drops.
This is the kind of passion you want your social media to drive for your brand. When you consistently post great content and share valuable insights from your book and life, you keep your community engaged and excited for what you’re going to share next. As they value your social media presence, they will also come to your book, speaking engagements, articles, and YouTube videos to learn more about what you have to say.
When Engagement Turns Into Success for Your Book
After you’ve put in the work to build trust, community, and engagement on your social media profiles, you want to measure your success and see how your efforts have moved the needle for your brand. This is when you turn to your metrics.
Tracking monthly numbers helps you spot trends, top content, and areas for improvement, so you can better serve your audience and reach your goals. Here’s what to focus on:
Fan and follower counts are fundamental. You should aim for consistent growth, indicating a healthy social media presence. However, don’t worry if your follower count doesn’t jump quickly; building the right audience takes time as you start posting consistently.
Engagement metrics show how well your content connects with your audience: Do they like, comment on, and share your posts? At the end of each month, you should go back through your posts to see what performed best between videos versus photos, humorous versus educational, etc. Then you can try more of what’s resonating with your audience.
Website activity shows how effective your social media is at driving people to your brand, book, or services. We use tools like Google Analytics to track which social media platforms drive the most traffic each month. You can also use Linktree or Lnk.Bio, where you can list your website and book purchasing links, and it will show how many clicks you’ve received month to month.
The Bottom Line
Solidifying your brand on social media to build trust and community with your audience is a critical step in growing an online presence that promotes your book. Show your audience consistent value by providing authentic, high-quality content, and by asking questions to build relationships, not just to put on a stage for yourself. Once you’ve put in the work to create that community, your followers and engagement rate will rise, in turn leading people to your website, book, and other offerings.
Take Action
Do you feel more equipped to build your brand and understand how to promote yourself on social media? We hope this blog has given you more tools and direction for building your social media as an author or thought leader, but if you need more help, Weaving Influence would love to assist you!
We help nonfiction authors amplify their books online through social media management, email marketing, public relations, and so much more. If you’d like to learn more about how we help grow social media for authors and thought leaders, get in touch with us to schedule a free consultation!
