Building a brand image and an online persona is no longer possible without social media. Over 5.17 billion social media users worldwide, giving businesses the opportunity to develop and modernize their brand identity online via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok.
However, as trends change rapidly, brands may find themselves with an outdated or irrelevant social media presence. The timing and how to rebrand on social media are important to keep presenting a fresh face to new and old audiences. In order for the process to be successful, a lot of strategy and execution needs to be done to keep the brand recognized while at the same time showing a refreshed online personality that feels current.
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When Is It Time for a Social Media Rebrand?
Several signs indicate it may be time to reinvigorate your brand image on social platforms:
Your content feels stale. A rebrand could help you start being more creative with your marketing if you’re recycling the same posts and struggling to create interesting social content. Consider a delete all tweets at once with TweetEraser at once and start fresh with your new content strategy.
Your brand has gone through significant changes. Launching new products, undergoing a merger, or pivoting business models warrants updating social platforms to reflect major real-world shifts.
Your target audience is different. If you’re now catering to a different demographic or increased customer base, then your social presence should reflect that.
Your brand personality feels out of date. It can quickly feel as if everything is ‘overdone’ or ‘become irrelevant’. Rebranding allows you to adopt a more modern and timelier online persona.
You don’t want to get dragged into controversies. Because of scandals or public backlash, you may also need to reposition your brand on social platforms in a new light.
Your competitors are moving forward. Watching social media marketing for others in your industry work can motivate you to give your brand an online makeover.
Steps for Successful Social Media Rebranding
Rebranding on social platforms takes careful planning and consistent implementation across channels. Follow these key steps:
Research your target audience and competitors. Reconnect with your existing and potential customers and analyze what resonates with them and how competitors are branding themselves. Surveys, interviews, and social listening provide valuable insights.
Identify your new brand positioning. Using audience research, determine the core identity you want to project moving forward, including messaging, personality, values, and positioning against competitors.
Create new branding assets and guidelines. Develop logos, color schemes, fonts, imagery, and content styles that reflect your new brand platform while retaining some familiar visual cues. Document guidelines for internal teams.
Devise a social media strategy. Map out the target metrics, platforms, content themes, partnerships, and resources required to support the rebranded presence and effectively promote it to each audience segment.
Design updated social profiles and assets. Use craft profiles, cover images, profile pictures, and other visual social elements that signal change without losing your brand’s recognizability to those who are already familiar with your brand.
Launch with a bang. To orchestrate a campaign across platforms, maximizing exposure and interest in the rebrand and showing the new brand direction with multiple posts, videos, and stories.
Create consistent content. Brand it when it comes to social—either via engagement or as a part of your brand story—to consistently generate regular, customized social content per your strategy to further solidify the rebranded personality and values.
Interact with your audience. Respond to comments and questions and actively engage followers in a way that reflects your brand-new online identity.
Measure and refine. Monitor the track metrics of follows, engagement, clicks, and conversions to see how the new presence strikes and areas to keep optimizing.
Refreshing a B2B Brand on Social Media
For B2B companies, rebranding business-facing social profiles requires special considerations:
Emphasize thought leadership content. When executives and experts begin to share valuable insights, trends, and best practices, they position themselves as a trusted advisor.
Highlight client case studies and testimonials. Real-world value is achieved through social proof from happy customers.
Leverage LinkedIn to its fullest. Company pages, employee profiles, Groups and targeted advertising are all things that fit nicely with B2B branding needs and are all aligned with the professional focus of the platform.
Attend and discuss industry events. Domain expertise is shown through commentary on conferences, tradeshows and news events.
Partner with influencers and media outlets. Partnerships amplify your content and lend third-party credibility.
Conduct lead generation campaigns. Webinars, demos, trials and gated resources can be used to generate sales-ready prospects.
Refreshing a B2C Brand on Social Media
B2C brands should take different approaches tailored to reaching retail customers:
Showcase lifestyle appeal. Demonstrate how customers can enhance their quality of life through aspirational imagery and evocative storytelling.
Facilitate social sharing and UGC. Encourage user-generated content and make branded posts highly shareable to expand reach.
Utilize influencer marketing. Work with relevant bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to achieve authentic endorsements.
Experiment with emerging social platforms. Stay on the pulse of trendy apps like TikTok to connect with younger demographics.
Video brings products to life. Fun, engaging videos of your online persona keep followers connected and interested in new product launches.
Spotlight brand values and corporate social responsibility. Consumers increasingly support brands that give back or align with their personal convictions.
Potential Pitfalls to Avoid
Rebranding on social media comes with risks if not done thoughtfully and strategically. Confusing your audience, diluting brand recognition, or missing the mark with your messaging are all possible missteps. Carefully avoid these common pitfalls that could sabotage your efforts:
Making Drastic Changes Too Quickly
Resist the urge to radically transform your brand’s visual identity, personality, or voice overnight. While small tweaks over time may go unnoticed, dramatic shifts in appearance, messaging, or features can disorient audiences who have grown loyal to your familiar brand.
For example, changing your logo, website design, tagline, color scheme, and campaign focus all at once prevents followers from adjusting to changes gradually. Such abrupt, sweeping overhauls often feel jarring rather than refreshing. Instead, ease transitions can be achieved by focusing initial rebranding efforts on one or two core elements and then gradually progressing to others.
Failing to Involve Stakeholders in your Online Persona
Rebranding without internal consensus leads to fragmented external perceptions. When executives dictate changes without input from marketing, communications, customer service, and other teams, misalignment results. Departments end up sending mixed messages instead of coordinating unified branding shifts across touchpoints.
Disengaged employees may even share negative opinions that undermine the reboot. Early on, get all stakeholders aligned behind the “why” and “how” through collaborative planning sessions, survey feedback, and transparent communications.
Assuming You Know Your Audience
Relying on assumptions rather than actual data about current customer preferences can make your messaging miss the mark. Brand perception tends to lag behind reality when audiences evolve. Regular quantitative and qualitative insights directly from your followers provide more accurate guidance than guesses, even by longtime marketing teams.
Common misconceptions get corrected when you directly ask target segments what resonates or observe real-time reactions to new social content. Commit resources to social listening, focus groups, online surveys, and online interviews to reality-check your audience knowledge before finalizing rebranding strategies.
Diverting Too Many Resources
The costs of rebranding—especially if done right—add up quickly. From creative fees to new asset production, employee training, technical integrations, inventory changes, and added marketing spend, budgets strain to support the transformation.
Avoid financially overextending marketing budgets or pulling from other essential initiatives to fund the social media facelift. Consider cost-efficient solutions like refreshing logo marks instead of a complete redesign or repurposing existing visuals.
Forcing Changes Across All Platforms
Each social media platform serves unique needs, reaching distinct audiences. Lumping them together instead can undermine rebranding attempts. For example, a B2B company changing its social handles may make sense on Twitter but feels unnecessary for retention efforts on Facebook. Similarly, while modernizing a logo boosts LinkedIn’s professional appearance, fun TikTok content may benefit more from viral meme references.
Evaluate rebranding elements separately per channel, keeping platform differentiation in mind even as you aim for cross-channel consistency. Blanket updates without purpose dilute their impact.
Conclusion
The rite of passage for enduring brands that want to stay relevant in the digital age is rebranding on social media platforms. If done strategically, overhauling your online persona can rejuvenate your external brand perceptions as well as your internal teams.
But this process requires a lot of planning, stakeholder coordination, creative execution and continual maintenance of the evolved identity. Don’t spend all your money on refreshing your brand’s social presence, but don’t throw it all out and start again. Without losing sight of who you are and where you are going, meet audiences where they are now. If you strike the right balance, your brand can keep making authentic connections on both new and old social channels.
