10 Best Brand Guidelines Templates (+Tips) | Visme
Your brand is the identity of that magical thing you have to offer the world. Your great idea turned into a business, your startup or home-based hustle. Regardless of how your brand came to be, you’ll need social media branding to make it grow.
There’s no way around it. If you’re not on social media with your brand, your efforts to connect, network and convert will be significantly impaired.
A social media branding strategy goes hand in hand with your digital marketing scheme, promotional and advertising strategies and content marketing management.
Your agile developed website or app, your e-commerce platform, or brick and mortar location all need a social media presence with active engagement.
Social media branding is all about taking your brand from your website—and brand guidelines document— to social media.
The transfer includes the creation of specific content for all social media channels. Most specifically, visual items like headers, profile photos, graphics, ads, and your brand voice’s content like descriptions, captions, and interaction with followers.
Every visual content element uses brand colors, fonts, and imagery previously decided upon in the strategy stage. A successful social media branding project continues forever. It’s not a “set up your profiles, and you’re done” type project.
Your social media branding continues throughout every interaction and engagement with people on social media. Your brand is not just your logo, so even though your logo is recognizable, it’s even more impactful as a messaging tool, evident in both the copy and the DMs.
There are several reasons why social media branding is indispensable. Here’s a quick overview:
Visual recognition and psychological association are the first layer of social media branding and are all about how it links to your official website and communication with the customer.
When potential clients or users hear about your brand, they’ll go online to find your social media channels. It’s how they start to get to know your brand and what it’s all about. Every channel you’re active in needs to reflect your brand in both visual and messaging aspects.
Let’s say someone first hears about your brand from a friend; they’ll go on their preferred social media channel and look for your brand name. If they like what they see and read, they’ll search for a link to your website.
The transition from social media to website needs to be seamless without obstacles or difficulties.
Brand awareness is about people being aware that your brand exists and why. You can attain good brand awareness through social media marketing.
The trick is to build a brand strategy that spans all marketing funnel levels, particularly at the top. The messaging and tone of your social media visuals and the copy is where you’ll grab the public’s attention.
Growing brand awareness with social media branding involves always looking for new people to reach and more people to connect with. You’ll know how to make these changes with market research and social listening.
Finally, another significant reason social media branding is important is social proof. The thing about social proof, though, is that it’s not directly correlated to how you do your social media branding but more about how others see it. It’s more a response to your efforts than a result of them.
It’s time to dive deep into the nitty-gritty about how to brand your social media. We’ve broken down the process into a 5-step formula that will get you set up for success in no time.
Let’s get started!
Before you can do any sort of social media branding, it’s essential to have a clear foundation. Social media branding strategies don’t start with creating a bunch of Instagram posts; you need a brand identity first.
A branding identity has two parts.
One is the visual branding; like the fonts, colors and overall visual quality of the brand. The other is a general idea of the purpose and mission of the brand.
You don’t need to have a manifesto, but at least an outline of the overall idea. You can always write a brand manifesto later.
Your brand guidelines are a document that outlines and showcases your fonts, color palettes and fonts. There should be a section that suggests dos and don'ts for the use of the logo, optimal text dimensions for different situations and hex numbers in all color palettes (primary, secondary, etc.).
Inside the brand guidelines document is an important section that pertains to how you communicate with your customers on social media as your brand; these are the brand voice and tone. This section will explain the parameters of how your brand “speaks” when content includes text, audio or video.
With your brand guidelines ready, it’s time to talk about your social media goals. Having clear social media goals helps you determine who you’re seeking out on social media and how to reach them positively with your brand.
These are the main types of social media goals:
Your main goal will create the foundation for everything you do for your brand on social media. Next, you need to know which social media channel, and content, is best for which goal.
In a very broad sense, each channel has a personality and marketing angle according to who uses it. You can use these insights to craft forward-thinking social media branding.
The ubiquitous, global social network used by 2B users to share videos, photos, and links. Lots of ads by businesses in every industry.
Pros: Mostly suited for B2C marketing, but B2B also works. It contains the largest number of connections/friends.
Cons: Everyone you know is on it and lacks a cool, exclusive appeal. It’s saturated with advertising, clickbait and conspiracy theories.
400 million users post text, links, images and video in 280 characters or less.
Pros: Instant news source. Access to public icons.
Cons: High volume of content that refreshes at high speeds.
A primarily mobile app where 1.3 B users share videos, photos and carousels.
Pros: Easy scrolling without much text and minimal links. Beautiful, eye-catching photography and videos.
Cons: Less organic engagement than other channels.
No longer the resume sharing platform. LinkedIn has become more social, but still with a business tone and general topic.
Pros: Best channel for B2B marketing. Share links, photos, videos and newsletters.
Cons: Many features are only available with a paid subscription.
Easy to scroll, 100% visual channel, primarily for mobile. All vertical videos.
Pros: Good channel to reach wider audiences in younger age groups.
Cons: Finding a good brand strategy for TikTok is difficult without doing dances and humorous skits.
Social video channel with 2.4 Billion users. Everything is video, primarily horizontal but now also vertical in YouTube Shorts.
Pros: With good YouTube SEO, you can reach many people.
Cons: You need at least some video production expertise to stand out on this channel.
Inspirational social media channel. Vertical content is shared regularly, including videos and carousels.
Pros: Great channel to reach solopreneurs and small businesses; most users are women.
Cons: Idea pins don’t have links, and social engagement is very low.
Once you’ve narrowed down whom you will be talking to and where, it’s the perfect time to create marketing personas to help your social media team come to grips with the brand tone and messaging for the goal you’ve decided to pursue.
Each persona is an approximation to the general personality traits of the people that your brand exists for.
Take into consideration what you envision your brand to mean to these personas. How must your brand communicate with them so they become loyal clients?
Tweak the messaging to match the person’s style that uses each channel. For example, on Instagram, it is best to be motivational, upbeat and inspiring. On LinkedIn, it’s more about business knowledge and sharing professional value. TikTok needs to be peppy and a bit offbeat to really catch attention.
Social media schedulers like Agorapulse and Sendible offer options to post to all different channels independently, so you can tweak the messaging even if it’s for the same campaign.
It’s time to optimize your social media profiles. Create the social media profiles first if you haven't yet. Create usernames that are identical or as close as possible to your brand name.
It’s tempting for any brand to want to be active and branded on every single social media channel, but the truth of the matter is that, at first, you only really need to be active where your target market spends their time.
As your brand grows and the need to widen the funnel at the brand awareness stage expands, you can increase your activity on more channels.
That said, as you’re growing, it’s still a good idea to create a social media presence on every channel, but be more active on the ones that make sense to your brand goal. Use the bio description to direct visitors to the active channels on the channels where you won’t be as active at the beginning.
How do you know what channels to start with?
Use the research from the social media brand strategy, the marketing persona information and the demographics to pick the top two or three channels to start with at full scale.
After you’ve chosen the accounts and created them, here’s a rundown of all the branding elements you’ll need to take care of when optimizing your channels:
To stay consistent across channels, use the same profile image. If your brand is you, use either your photo or your logo. Create consistent headers for all channels; create one and then resize for all channels.
Crafting a description is a bit like writing an elevator pitch. How can you explain your brand in one or two sentences? Don’t forget all the essential links like your website, app download, etc.
For channels with limited linking options, use a service that offers one link to host a customizable page with many links—for example, Linktree, Shorby and SmartBio.
Sharing content on social media is the continuation of the strategy. Your brand now has a social presence, and it’s time to regularly share your knowledge and value with the world.
With two or three active social media accounts, you’ll create a sizable amount of visual and textual content; all of it must match your brand guidelines and messaging tone.
Have your Visme dashboard open and create a folder called “social media,” where you’ll start collecting all the visuals you make. Keep them all organized with labeled folders and tags to help you keep track of them.
While creating the visual content with your team, use the collaboration feature to task team members with edits and leave comments.
Create content geared and customized for the social media channels you’ve chosen. To make it easier, come up with topics and pillars that resemble the pillars of your content marketing strategy. Refer to our guide on social media dimensions per channel to know what size each type of content needs.
Start creating batches of content. Use your brand guidelines as a visual roadmap and ensure every design represents the brand. Below are the types of visual content you’ll be creating regularly. Video is at the top because it’s the most versatile and the most used.
Your branding will continue to shine on social media through branded topics and ad campaigns. All the content for these projects will need your brand front and center.
Branded hashtags are a great example of social media branding. For instance, we use the hashtag #madewithvisme for things we share on different social media channels, especially those created with Visme!
When planning your content clusters for social media, create tangential strategies for every channel. Differentiate the messaging or even the visuals; this way, you’ll reach more of the right people for what you wish to achieve.
Repurposing is one of your best friends for social media creation and branding. Turn an evergreen blog post from an important content pillar into an Instagram carousel or short video. Recreate or resize graphics to use in a newsletter or Pinterest idea pin.
Imagine every recreation of the same content as conversations with different people about the same topic. The storytelling changes a little, but the story stays the same.
There’s no better way to create branded content regularly than with a library of reusable templates. Visme gives you a couple of options to generate and produce templates collaboratively.
First, import your brand into your Visme editor using the Brand Wizard. Simply input your website URL, and select your brand colors and fonts. The wizard will then generate a collection of templates using your brand assets, some of which are social media graphics.
Use previously created graphics and convert them into brand templates. Your team will have access to the library of reusable templates that will always be on-brand.
Just how your brand is front and center in visual graphics, content and campaigns, it also needs to be the foundation for communication with customers, followers, and fans. Every engagement on social media must follow brand voice and tone guidelines.
Work with your customer success team to have a unifying language and communication strategy. This way, people that encounter your brand at different touch points will have an impactful moment that inspires them to seek you out further. On every occasion, your message must tell the same story.
Unified brand voices on social media and across touchpoints are essential for multichannel and omnichannel marketing. But none of it will work without a solid Company Culture that expands outwards from your teams and their communication.
Every visual element you require for successful social media branding strategies is available inside your Visme dashboard. Yes, you can even start using Visme at the branding strategy stage to create logos, brand kits and visual brand guidelines.
Take advantage of the collaboration feature to create your team’s brand assets together. Ask for feedback and leave comments on other people’s work. Give viewing access to the interactive brand style guidelines to everyone in your company. Create content like branded templates that everyone has access to for social media and beyond.
If you’re keen to get started right away, the Visme Brand Wizard will generate a versatile collection with hundreds of professionally designed templates ready to use instantly on social media and more. All you need is a website built upon your brand guidelines or a folder of brand assets that you can upload to Visme easily.
Optimize your social media branding with Visme with tools that help you strategize, create, collaborate and manage visual content of all types. Can’t wait to see what you create!
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