Due to the growing close connection between businesses and their social media façade, exhibiting authenticity across both becomes an exercise in brand building.

With any luck, your brand will already carry strong connotations of authenticity. If not, it’s time to generate those. It can be painstaking and progress might be slow, but if you are truly earnest in your endeavours to deliver a quality experience to clients, this should shine through.

Sometimes, things can get lost in translation. If you’re struggling to exhibit genuine authenticity through your social media channels, these tips might help.

Be Real.

Ensure your brand’s voice is clear and present in everything you do. Don’t flood your page with items shared from elsewhere, and give everyone a chance to see the real you.

Offer Something.

There are far too many brands out there trying to sell, sell, sell. Before you ask, give. Simply standing in front of a crowd and telling them they should pay you their hard-earned cash to do something for them is not enough. You need to illustrate knowledge, expertise and genuine skill in that arena.

Engage.

Talk with your followers, answer their questions, ask them some yourself. Do everything you can to build a community of people who are willing to chat, exchange ideas and ultimately trust you as an authority.

The key to authenticity is that you have to mean it. You have to be prepared to take that extra step to build trust.

It’s not a race to empty your clients’ wallets. It’s a race to be the best help they’ll ever get when they’re in need.

Read more: Building Authenticity on Social Media.

Images grab our eye – prima facie, they are more interesting and exciting than plain text. They are easy to digest, and as the old adage goes, each one is worth a thousand words.

As the world moves even more rapidly towards video interaction, the relevance of images as a quick and easy means of communication has become more pronounced than ever.

People share images at a considerably high rate than other post types. Of the huge number of interactions on Facebook daily, 87% are with photos.

A successful image post needs to incorporate three basic factors in order to achieve its full potential.

Quality

There’s nothing worse than a poorly cropped image. When you’re creating an image, consider its intended use and goals. Ensure it is sized correctly. For example, a Facebook news feed post should be 472×394; a page likes acquisition advertisement should be 1200×444.

Relevance

An image needs to be relevant to its target audience to garner interest. If you’re not displaying something that people want to see, they simply won’t engage.

Value

In order to attract and retain attention, you must provide value. Whether that is entertainment, information, inspiration or even a sales piece, it needs to provide the audience with something that they value. Always evaluate what you’re offering, and be sure to give more than you ask for.

The key thing to remember is that visual imagery isn’t simply a magic pill that will automatically increase engagement. Done incorrectly, you can turn your audience off and actively damage your reach and engagement levels. Even worse, poor image management can harm your brand image.

Clear goals and correct execution will ensure you get maximum value from every image post you make.

Read more: Increase Social Engagement with Images.

Defining the parameters of your brand’s actions in the digital sphere make it clearer what your ideal approach to engagement should be. However, in almost all cases, increased engagement is preferable.

There are several reasons for this:

Clients like to know that you’re listening.

“The customer is always right”. It’s a statement that has reverberated for decades, and continues to elicit confusion as to its intended meaning. However, like most companies, your product or service is no doubt engineered to address a need. Demand is generated by your clients, and responding to their wishes is an effective way of maintaining sales impetus.

Engagement will reinforce your brand image.

Done correctly, your social engagement can go a long way towards establishing and emphasising your brand image. If your community manager has an adequate grasp on your brand’s voice, you can really cement your image in the eyes of your audience.

Nobody likes a brick wall.

Regardless of your industry, open and willing communication is almost always a positive factor when it comes to developing client relationships. If your clients can speak to you, and you respond in a timely and appropriate fashion, you can make a great progress developing long term loyalty.

Naturally, budget considerations come into play when determining your ideal level of engagement. It is difficult even for very large companies to maintain a 24/7 presence on social media. However, the general public are quite forgiving when it comes to delayed engagement, provided they eventually get a response.

Irrespective of your industry or niche, improving the nature of your engagement with clients is a must. Social media is a two-way street; it requires banter from all sides to work to its fullest extent.

Read more: Why You Should Focus on Social Engagement.

The recipe for effective improvement involves data analysis, understanding, and action in balanced parts.

Without improvement, you become stale.

Your ability to reach the broadest and most relevant audience weakens. This is not an ideal situation for any social media strategy.

Critical Analysis

It might sound boring, but data is the key to successful critical analysis. Provided you’ve got a sufficiently large pool of information, you can learn a lot from simply looking at what works. Which posts received the most clicks? How do they differ from less successful posts? Do some posts receive considerable engagement, but very low conversion to website visits? How can this be leveraged?

Far too many people become trapped in a quagmire of pointless data analysis, but done correctly it can provide a considerable boost to your understanding of your target audience.

Understanding

This is the tricky part. There are an enormous number of variables contributing to the success of individual strategies. Understanding which one affected your outcome can be a hit-and-miss business. Was it the title or the timing? Was it the image or the audience?

It may take some experimentation, but eventually you’ll find a way to arrive quickly at conclusions that are easily supported by your data.

Action

It can be hard to know what to do with your data. However, action is a necessary precursor to a good result. It might take some trial and error, and you may need to take some risks. However, done intelligently, minor changes can lead to major results.

Social media is dynamic. It is constantly changing according to the whims of culture and technology. Constant improvement ensures you stay abreast of the tide and always relevant to your audience.

Read more: Revisit, Revise & Renew = Improvement.

Social media provides companies with the opportunity to interact directly with their clients in a neutral environment. As a result, we often see vast disparities between real-world feedback and online feedback. Clients are more direct in their criticism, yet also more thorough in their praise.

Even those companies which have perfected the art of hearing and responding to their clients within acceptable timeframes are often missing the bigger picture. Listening is not only about hearing your clients, but also your competitors.

There are three key reasons to listen on social media:

Social Improvement

Taking on board what your competitors are doing can lead to massive improvements in the way you carry out your social strategies. You don’t need to “copy” your competitors, but rather understand their brand and discover where your own can carve out a stronger niche.

Customer Satisfaction

This is the leading reason for actively listening on social media. Hearing and adequately responding to feedback, criticism and suggestions from your clients leads to a stronger relationship. This often translates into a wider circle of influence, which ultimately leads to…

Sales

This is the reason your company exists. Your social media strategy should have increased sales as its ultimate goal, regardless of the processes taken to achieve this. If you listen, and prove that you’re listening, you stand a strong chance of improving your sales.

Listening to everything in your social media sphere (with an emphasis on your clients) allows you to develop a clearer perspective of where your company stands. Constant improvement is a great strategy to improve your social presence, and listening is the key to improving.

Read more: Listen to Feedback from all Social Sources.

However, there can be drawbacks. Sharing is often inadvertently associated with endorsement, and if you don’t do your research, you might find yourself giving your tick of approval to sub-par content.

What are the main advantages to sharing great content?

You deliver top quality content to your audience.

Unless you’re in the world’s most niche industry, you will never be the exclusive producer of quality content for your market. There is always another perspective worth hearing. If you value your followers, be sure to introduce them to the most informed insights into their interests.

It improves your reputation as an expert.

If you are selective in the content you pass on, you can reinforce your brand image as an expert in your field. Choose properly researched, well written content to share. Ensuring the accuracy of what you pass on to your followers is paramount to building trust.

It creates a stronger community.

So many search for the magic pill that will deliver them a cohesive community of engaged followers. However, it’s not that simple. A community must be maintained. It must be fed and nurtured. Sharing content from other industry leaders does that.

Ensure that you provide top quality information drawn from your own expertise while also opening your audience to a wider perspective.

Where possible, share content on your own platform. Invite industry experts to write guest articles for your website or social media profile. This reinforces your brand authenticity while also delivering greater engagement.

It’s important to maintain a good balance between shared and original content. Continue to deliver great stuff to your followers, but don’t dilute your own brand image in the process.

Read more: Share Engaging Content with your Followers.

Bandwaggoning is a sadly obvious symptom of this illness. Businesses jumping on trends and issues simply for the sake of exposure is never healthy in the long run.

Rather than using social media as a conduit for spreading the highly valuable message that their business represents, community managers too often focus on amassing likes and followers.

Remember, social media is simply an additional marketing avenue, and by no means is it a guaranteed key to success.

Here are a few tips to keep your social media strategy focussed on what matters.

Connect with like-minded people and businesses

By definition, social media is social. Spread your name around and create a strong network with others in your industry. It’s an easy way to keep tabs on your competitors while also providing an opportunity to create new leads.

Create a strong impression

Stand out from the crowd. Make sure your social media posts have a bit of bang to them. Colour, images, and noticeable headlines are a simple start.

Add value

Don’t be just another voice in your crowd. Ensure that you always bring something to the personal and professional lives of your followers.

Remember your roots

Always remember who you are and what you do. Your activity on social media should reinforce your brand image, not dilute it.

Have a distinct message

If you don’t have a social media ethos, create one. Whatever your core message is, everything you do should return to it.

The key to maintaining a unique brand image on social media is consistency. Understand your brand message and employ the full power of social media to spread it to the masses.

Read more: Maintain a Unique Brand on Social Media.