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Social media is a great place to tell stories about your business, products, customers, experiences, workplaces, and partnerships that help to bring your brand personality to life. In the past, brands had to rely on advertising, public relations (PR), and word-of-mouth to help shape their reputation. For consumers, trusting those communication channels was uncertain. Today, businesses exist in a space populated by narratives that are so plainly authentic, it’s hard not to trust them.
Forbes reports that trust in brands is shaped by “consistency, honesty and transparency.” Social networks are the perfect spaces to deliver those qualities because they allow you to tell the stories of real people inventing, developing, selling, buying, using, reviewing, and recommending products and services.
If you want people to believe in your brand and trust in it as a marker of quality, you need to maintain a consistent, strong social narrative throughout your social networking channels. Read on to find out how to hone your skills as a social media story maker.
Making your employees the heroes of your brand story
Businesses are faceless entities—what makes them human, sympathetic, and believable are the people who work for them. From the sales staff to the CEO, your people have a story to tell.
Depending on your industry and offerings, you and your people’s stories may include:
Why you offer an appealing place to work
How innovations in your business come to light
The effort that goes into building your products and services
What it takes to get your finished prototypes approved
How sales strategies are developed
How logistics teams get your products from A to Z
Your relationships with clients and customers
You might choose to celebrate the efforts of your people by photographing and filming them in the workplace and sharing on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok (with their explicit permission). With the Unfold for Squarespace app, you can ensure your Instagram page fully represents your brand’s visual identification system as you roll it out and create rich narratives from your photos, videos, and text. You can use Unfold to craft stories, posts, and video content. Import your own images and video clips into Unfold’s exclusive Reels templates and create and share dynamic branded content for Instagram Reels and TikTok. This streamlined tool connects your brand assets directly with your social media accounts to reach a wider audience and maintain brand consistency.
Sharing your people’s stories isn’t just good for building consumer trust, it’s also a great way of showing what it’s like to work for you. This can help you to attract and retain the best talent in your sector.
Inviting fans of your brand to be part of the narrative
In the days before social media, outside the opinion of respected journalists and reviewers, word-of-mouth was probably the best way to build trust in your brand. If people were talking about your products and services in a positive way, other people would be more likely to buy them.
Social media gives small businesses an opportunity to harness that word-of-mouth reputation and present it within a cohesive digital framework to a highly targeted audience of potential buyers. All you need to do is to welcome customers to be part of your social media narrative strategy.
Consider the following:
Engaging with known social media influencers within your sector (e.g., send them your products to review or showcase on their own social channels)
Asking your most valued followers on your social media channels to submit images, videos, or guest articles (so you can share blog posts on your social channels) where they celebrate your brand and its products and services
Sharing with your own social network whatever the above people post on theirs
Inviting people to be part of your product development journey and then sharing that involvement on your social channels via images, carousel posts (LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook), stories, Reels, and even simple tweets
Shaping your own brand story
Building a brand is a process of managing your own reputation. Yes, your employees and customers are there to put the story of your brand into their own words, pictures, and videos. But, in choosing which of those individual perspectives to showcase with your social networks, you’ll need to decide which ones best represent you.
You don't need to share everything that people say about you on social media. Instead, focus on sharing content from the customers or employees who most accurately represent your typical buyer persona, since they’re most likely to influence your target audience’s perception of your brand.
In order to devise an effective social media content strategy, you need to know how you want to be perceived as a business, and then incorporate only stories that accurately represent that vision into your brand narrative.
Read more about how social media can grow your brand.