How to align personal and company brands on social media 

Introduction

Personality is a secret weapon in social media and branding. Thought leaders bring brands to life, set them apart from their competitors, and are proven to benefit company social media accounts. It’s a simple fact: humans want to interact with other humans more than brands.

Every company should promote the personalities in their business but lots of companies struggle with getting their founders or employees to support their company’s social media. So in this blog we’re going to look at how to align personal and company accounts under one social media strategy.

People power

One of my clients wanted to run an experiment: they posted the exact same posts on their company LinkedIn account and on the account of their founder to see which performed better. The posts from the personal account performed better every single time.

Why? It’s simple: humans like interacting with humans. We’re biologically hardwired to respond to a post that comes from a face and a name, over a brand and a logo.

This can be frustrating in social media management as the aim is usually to grow the company account. But, if you can get your employees on board and align personal and company brands, it’s a huge opportunity. 

Your company’s people can become your biggest asset but they’re going to need some help. Here’s how to get started:

Step 1: Form your opinions

First, you need to work out the opinions behind your brand. As we discussed in our blog on brand design, branding is not just about logos, typography, and colours. It’s also about tone of voice, messaging, and perspectives. 

Opinions are crucial to social media and branding and they have to be strong. Trying to appeal to everyone means appealing to no one, so finding a unique angle - being bold and controversial - is an important part of any social media strategy.

Step 2: Establish your thought leaders

Next you need to find the champions of these perspectives. Lots of companies try to make every employee a social media thought leader but the most important people are the founders. The clue is in the name, “thought leadership” should start at the top. Founder-led marketing has the most potential influence and other employees will follow the leadership team’s example.

Topics and opinions should be assigned to specific owners within the business. If we take a sustainable brand as an example, the CEO could post about maintaining an ethical company culture and mission, the Chief Financial Officer could post about the potential financial benefits of adopting green technologies, and the Chief Sustainability Officer could post about the damage that greenwashing does to the planet. Each employee represents one aspect to the business and sticks with it.

Step 3: Align personal and company branding

Your founders’ social media profiles have to be aligned with the branding of the business. This is important to make sure the company gets the benefits of personal posting, you need to make it very clear that they represent the brand. 

This is also important to make sure the founder looks credible. If it’s done correctly, active founders have a halo effect on the company account, giving a boost to following and engagement. But if it’s done wrong it can have the opposite effect. If your CEO’s profile picture is a blurry selfie, their banner is off-brand, and the website link in their profile is for their old company, it can seriously damage the business.

These are key aspects to setting up founder accounts:

• Visual branding that matches the company: The LinkedIn banner should be company branded and the personal headshot should be professional and consistent with other people in the company.

• Descriptions and keywords: The text in your founder’s “about” and “experience” sections should align with your company descriptions and include all the keywords associated with your brand. This works just like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it makes it easier for people to find your company on LinkedIn.

• Connections: The founders should be following companies and engaging with professionals within the target customer profile. The LinkedIn algorithm chooses who your posts are shown to based on who you interact with, so being reposted by your founder’s cousin, best friend, and grandmother won’t cut it.

Step 4: Promote the company content

Now the profiles are set up we can focus on how the personal accounts amplify your company posts. Sometimes it’s best to keep it simple: get your founders to “instant repost” your company content. With one click, the post gets more amplification and the engagement goes to the company rather than the person.

If you think your founder can take on a bit more, get them to post a slight variation of the company page content as an original post on their personal profile. This will increase engagement and demonstrate their thought leadership but it does require more time (something that founders are short of). It’s better to get a simple repost than pushing for them to write something and getting nothing at all.

If they’re doing their own posts ask them to link back to the company page every time and add company hashtags. This sounds simple but often it gets missed! If they really trust the social media manager, you can ask for access to their accounts to make sure everything gets posted correctly and the company page gets all the potential benefits. 

Step 5: Encourage founders and employees to participate

One of the hardest parts of aligning personal and company brands is how to encourage employees and founders to engage. Social media is not their day job and they have 101 things they need to do. These are my three tips:

1. Explain the business case: You need to educate the founder on why more followers and engagement matter to the business. Talk them through the ROI of social media. Explain to them how their personal profile can be an amplifier to the brand and ultimately help them get more sales.

2. Focus on their career: The goal is to benefit the company but improving their social media accounts and generating more engagement also helps founders and employees personally. They expand their networks, make new connections, and it can lead to new opportunities they haven’t even considered.

3. Make it as easy for them as possible: Making reasonable requests and demanding as little time from the founder and employees as possible is the easiest way to get things done. Any work that can be taken off their plate will help, which could include hiring a trusted social media manager to post on their behalf or draft content for them.
4. Create an employee advocacy programme with incentives: Like I said, social media isn't part of everyone's job. Reward the employees who invest time in it. Not only does it recognise their effort, but it also encourages others to get involved.

How a social media manager could help

Social media managers are behind some of the best and most influential founder accounts. Even if the founders are writing and posting their own content themselves, their social media managers have almost certainly had a hand in setting up and professionalising their profile, helping to establish topics to post on, and aligning the personal and company accounts. 

A good social media manager can support personal brands with:

• Account setup, professionalisation, and branding
• Establishing the key “opinions” for the company
• Identifying social media trends and topics to jump on
• Creating a social media calendar and drafting posts
• Engaging with relevant target audience accounts

Do you want help with social media and branding?

If you have a great founder that you want to amplify on social media we can help. We turn founders into thought leaders, make them champions of their business, and grow their following and influence. Contact us to discuss how we can align personal and company accounts in your social media strategy.