How To Build Brand Authenticity On Social Media

In a world where social media platforms are flooded with advertisements, influencer marketing, and branded content, it can be tough to stand out and build a loyal following.

However, the key to success lies in building brand authenticity. In this blog, we'll explore the tips and tricks to help you connect with your audience, build trust, and create a strong brand identity on social media.

From showcasing user-generated content to being transparent about your brand values, let's dive into the world of social media branding and discover how to build a truly authentic brand.

What is Brand Authenticity?

Brand authenticity is all about keeping it real and being transparent with your consumers. Whether it’s your mission, vision, and core values, you need to be very honest to build an emotional connection with your consumers and even your employees.

Not only that, but you also need to align what you say you’d do and actually do it. In this way, you’d be able to close the gap between your consumers’ expectations and the actual consumer experiences.

Why is Brand Authenticity Important on Social Media?

Social media makes it easier for consumers to know and find out whether the brand is living up to what they’re claiming. Trust and honesty is the key to brand authenticity.

As a matter of fact, when consumers feel a real connection with the brand, 57% of them are willing to increase their spending and 76% of them will prefer them over their competitors.

So, putting your money where your mouth is:

Helps You Rise Above The Clutter

Many people use ad-blocking extensions to prevent viewing ads and other spammy content. However, if you’re honest and you keep it real, then you don’t have to worry about marketing your content, as your consumers will do it for you through word of mouth, social media, and other marketing channels.

Build Strong Relationships

As mentioned earlier, consumers can recognize fake and non-genuine marketing from afar. So, when your marketing messages genuinely resonate with your consumers, it’d help you build a strong connection and relationship.

Helps Stand Out From The Competitors

The only way to do this is to wear your heart on your sleeve and show genuine care to your consumers. You’d be more likely to be a trustable brand and would generate long-term brand loyalty.

5 Ways To Build Brand Authenticity On Social Media

Be Honest And Transparent As Much You Can Be

Sometimes brands lose their way and their true purpose of having the business in the first place. This is mainly because of being in the business for way too long. So, remembering who you are and your brand's mission and core values should be your top priority.

You also need to build or even find your brand’s goals again in order to appease your consumers. In that way, you'll easily be able to build trust and loyalty.

If You Make A Mistake, Accept It!

Let’s face it; we’ve all made mistakes on social media. It could be a typo, a grammatical mistake, or even a post that utterly failed.

Mistakes can happen to anyone. When it does, the first thing that probably comes to mind is to delete the post and forget about the entire thing. Well, that can be wise for a personal account, but it’s easier said than done when it's the brand's official social media account.

The minute you post something on your brand’s social media, it’ll be stuck in people’s memory forever. Even if you delete it, it won’t go off their minds that easily. So, it’s better to accept your mistake and find a way to fix it.

In this way, you’ll be better able to humanize your brand. Also, you’ll let the world know that real people are working on your brand, who can also make mistakes.

Build Great Brand Stories

We all love stories. The same goes for your consumers. They need to know when, where, and how your brand stands in its current state. What were the challenges and obstacles your brand faced? In that way, they’ll better understand your brand and its values.

Brand storytelling is essential for brand authenticity. This is because creating an authentic brand story can build trust and connect your audience emotionally.

The secret of major top brands is that they communicate through brand storytelling and offering valuable insights to their customers.

Keep Consistency In Your Brand

Consistency is the key to keeping your brand alive and remembered in the minds of your consumers. In this way, your audience will be able to recognize your brand instantly and easily acknowledge your brand’s blogs, emails, videos, etc.

For starters, you need to ensure that your branding and design are consistent in your content marketing strategy. That includes your website, social media, newsletters, and other marketing materials.

You can further make your brand consistent by creating digital ebooks and brochures. Here you can use branding on such marketing content with your company logo, color schemes, and custom background that goes with your brand flawlessly. It’ll also help you showcase your brand professionally on any desktop or mobile device.

Showcase Expertise In Your Niche

The level of experience you have gained over the years makes you an expert in your relevant niche. Now take your knowledge and wisdom to your advantage and consider how it can benefit your consumers.

Brand authenticity is also about sharing all your acquired knowledge with the world. Now we’re not asking you to give away your business secrets. However, if you happen to overcome a challenge using a unique approach, then do brag about it.

The best way to share your expertise is to leverage and strengthen all your media channels. Be it social media, websites, communities, or blogs. Using these channels, you can share and become a reliable source of relevant information. In this way, your target audience will be able to trust you and your brand and, ultimately, come to your brand to make a purchase.

3 Best Examples of Brand Authenticity

Fenty Beauty

Fenty Beauty is well known for the diversity of all their beauty products. They’re also known for promoting user-generated content on their social media. With the promotion of user-generated content, they can showcase how their beauty products will look to their customers with their different skin tones.

According to Stackla, 79% of consumers claim user-generated content highly impacts their buying decision. So, leveraging user-generated content helps build a strong connection with your consumers. This is because the content is generated by the audience themselves, who love using the product and aren’t afraid to show it to the world.

Patagonia

The popular sustainable outdoor apparel manufacturer Patagonia has core values to “build the best product…protect our home planet.” For their commitment, the founder Yvon Chouinard pledged to donate or invest either $1 of sales or 10% of profits, whichever is greater, to save the planet.

The company remains committed to its core values with a recent run-up to Christmas where it ran a poster campaign that explicitly told the customer, “Don’t buy this jacket.”

Source: patagonia.com

Patagonia showcases the true concept of brand authenticity by walking the talk. Their intention was for their consumers to change their buying behavior and encourage them “to make more considered purchases.” As a result, they successfully quadrupled their revenue.

Chobani

Chobani has dominated the Greek yogurt market in the last couple of years. As a matter of fact, according to Bloomberg, Chobani surpassed Yoplait in sales in 2016.

The CEO of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya, is a firm believer in the notion of giving back to the community. You'd see brand activism even with a casual scroll on their official Twitter account.

Not only that but also Ulukaya is devoted to creating a well-paid and happy workforce. He was a proactive advocate for raising the minimum wage. He even gave 10% of the company to his employees.

So, his tenacity to produce quality Greek yogurt made with natural ingredients and his commitment to building stronger communities have led to building brand authenticity at its best.

Best Tools To Build Brand Authenticity On Social Media

Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a powerful social media management tool designed to bridge the gap between businesses and consumers. Whether it’s social listening, brand monitoring, or building brand authenticity, it makes businesses of all sizes more efficient in their social media management.

Its advanced social media publishing tool allows you to reach your consumers effortlessly. With its multi-network scheduling and publishing, you can create custom posts and schedule and publish them on multiple social media platforms with live previews.

Its Engage feature empowers you to never miss any conversation around your brand on social media. You can respond to every reply, mention, and comment from a unified Social Inbox.

It also features a real-time sync, enabling you to receive and assign conversations and tasks to specific team members as soon as someone talks about your brand on any social media platform. Its Listening Dashboard lets you look for specific keywords or topics related to your brand.

Trusted by 16 million users across the globe, Statusbrew is integrated with all the popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Other featured integrations include Mailchimp, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Shopify, Zapier, and more.

Pricing: Starts at $69/month if billed annually.

RingCentral

RingCentral offers dynamic digital customer engagement software connecting your customers across 20+ digital channels. That includes web, email, chat, and social media.

It's a brilliant tool for building brand authenticity and a positive brand image, as it allows you to manage all your digital interactions from a single platform. It goes beyond phone calls and gets in touch with customers no matter which social media platform they already use.

It features AI-powered Smart Routing automatically assigns interactions to agents based on their competency. As a result, it improves overall productivity and achieves high levels of customer satisfaction.

With RingCentral, you can eliminate duplicate accounts and conversations and merge them across multiple channels into a single profile for simplicity.

This way, you’d also get complete data on all the previous customer interactions with your brand and agents. Leveraging such data will further help you deliver a more personalized customer experience.

You can supervise agent activity and monitor their screens in real-time to improve your agents’ productivity. Not only that, but RingCentral also allows you to continue the conversation with the same customer and agent they last interacted with.

Pricing: Contact Sales.

Brand24

Brand24 is a single and smart platform for social media monitoring, social listening, and building brand authenticity. It’s compatible with businesses of all sizes. It tracks every mention and tag about your brand, allowing you to address any negative sentiments effectively.

With a single dashboard, you can find and use various metrics such as sentiment analysis, the volume of mentions, social media reach, and engagement. You can even find top-tier profiles mentioning your brand and track hashtags to identify trending topics on social media.

You can also easily measure your brand awareness and manage your reputation with its social listening feature. It collects mentions about your brand from every major social media platform. That includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, TikTok, and Reddit. Not only that, but it also allows you to monitor news, blogs, review sites, podcasts and videos, and various other places.

It offers another helpful feature called custom reports, enabling you to share the insights and reports of your work with your team. You can also choose which metrics to include in your report and add your company branding color and logos to make it more professional.

Pricing: Starts at $79/month if billed annually.

Conclusion

Building brand authenticity isn’t easy; we get that. But with the tremendous benefits it offers, it’s surely the best way to build brand reputation, trust, and loyalty.

And when consumers fully trust a brand, 68% of them are more likely to buy from them first, stay loyal, and even become brand ambassadors.
When you’re authentic and honest, you’ll be more likely to create a loyal following and become a more successful brand.

So, when it comes to brand authenticity, “honesty is the best policy.”