Social Media Marketing Hiccups in Brand Building

Do you ever wonder why social media platforms want to keep you caged and leashed to their funny and addictive packs of irrelevant dopamine in the name of marketing on their digital spaces? You are not alone. Most people, especially the Millenniums Gen Z, X, and tech-savvy Baby boomers, are slowly coming to the reality of the misrepresentation of marketing for brand building on most social media platforms. Most creative and conscious entrepreneurs wonder whether Social Media Marketing is losing and giving in to the AI Tech algorithm intervention in Digital Marketing. 

The intimate romance between social media handles and their addicted users seems to be cooling down with disruptions from the advent of AI chatbot generative machine learning and its drooling hunger pangs to take over and control search engine algorithms. Though responsive and interactive for networking, social media has never been quite a professional tool for brand marketing due to reported data manipulation on most social media platforms. 

Nearly Outdated Social Media Platforms

 

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were pioneers and hot in the digital market. They were the rhythm and pulse of digital marketing, with their responsive algorithms churning millions and billions of views, likes, and comments for their users. And impressions on these platforms’ algorithms sent most users and consumers into a frenzy of seeing social media marketing as the backbone of digital marketing, with virality and attention garnering the name of the whole marketing game. The question is whether it will ever be like that again in this era of AI tech chatbots and machine learning generative algorithms.

 Also, did these millions of views of any value to the consumer? That remains a mystery since some reports about selling and buying views and subscribers were always hinted at and reported by a few who sometimes found themselves swindled in the glamour and glitz lifestyle game of social media marketing. Social media marketing has always been social and short-lived, not for business long-term brand building. Social media marketing has always been the glitz and glamour of romanticizing life and business in the name of marketing. So, where should you look to reinvent yourself and buckle up for intense self-promotion for brand building?

Mindset Change about Social Media Marketing

As the business landscape becomes continuously dominated by emerging technologies, so is man’s interest in social media marketing dwindling and drowning in new and upcoming ones claiming to be more appropriate for the ever-elusive and evolving AI tech generative algorithms. The intimate ballroom and tango dance on social media marketing platforms is slowly turning into a jilting affair with most in the know entrepreneurial users. Meta’s recently launched Threads which is vying to overtake Twitter in its fading popularity has left most creatives wondering whether it is worthwhile to go to any social media platform for their self-promotion efforts.

Will any of these emerging social media platforms ever rise to the previous hype that comes with being active on any social media platform? It seems the Artificial Intelligence algorithm is making the cheat sheeting of social media marketing platforms tight to manipulate and corrupt. So, what next in that scenario of social media marketing? Here is what we believe can help you not lose hope with the unpredictable and fast-changing social media marketing algorithms. It’s time creatives look elsewhere for better strategies for personal branding and self-promotion in their brand-building efforts. Here are six things to look into for changing your mindset from social media marketing to a more professional presentation of yourself in self-promotion.

Effect of Social Media on Brand Building

Social media stimulates a competitive spirit and leaves users feeling inadequate and that they are failures in all their creative efforts to make it in the world. It makes you lose your true identity and your creative power and identity. That is why they designed social media to be addictive and dopamine to most users. Some have since suffered psychological effects from their daily doses of social media. I don’t mean social media is not helpful in marketing, but be warned and claim back your sanity and identity in personal branding and self-promotion. Get your power back by rebranding yourself far from social media by revisiting your vision, mission, purpose, and value on social media platforms.

If you can’t define yourself and your purpose on any social media platform, perhaps you are playing a hop-and-skip game without realizing it. Social media is more on the entertainment side than an intentional marketing strategy. Your arena for self-promotion and personal branding with strategic collaboration and coordination of social media platforms is your website, whether as a portfolio, a blog, or an e-commerce site. Here is the thing, you can’t grow to maturity on social media platforms. Be you and do you on your platform. Here are the aspects you usually miss on any social media platform that are the cardinal elements in self-promotion for brand building in the oversaturated digital market.

Personal Website

Having your own site is a powerful way to reclaim your identity, sanity and authenticity that social media platforms easily neutralize, mute and destroy with misrepresentation of your personal brand for solid brand building. If you always overlooked a website as a brand marketing tool that most social media platforms never encourage you to build and direct your followers to, then it’s time you go back to the drawing board with yourself as an entrepreneur, creator, startup, freelancer, solopreneur and small business owner. 

You should not keep yourself on anyone’s property where you are more of a tenant than a landlord. If you choose to be on any platform, be there to for limited time with a clear purpose driven mindset of sharing value that promotes your own platform somewhere. The more time you spend on their platforms, the more you lose focus on your marketing message for self-promotion and brand building.

Vision and Mission

If your social media profile does not reflect the big picture of your dreams and goals, which is the vision and mission of your business venture, then it is a hustling game. That is what you hope to achieve as a fonder or creator in your business venture and how you make it be of impact and value in the world for the benefit of everyone concerned. Your vision is what should direct and change your mindset about social media as a marketing strategy in the creative digital economy. The question is, did you ever understand what your mission was on any of those platforms? 

How many social media platforms have some space on their layout template for you as a user to spell out your vision in life and business? If I am not mistaken, I never had any social media platform ask me to rethink my vision and be visionary on their platform. Yet as a marketing platform, that should be the basis of everything you are supposed to do on those platforms unless you are just there as an entertainer, not for brand marketing. Even as an entertainer, there is a time when your consumers need to have a glimpse of who you are from your well-defined vision and be accessible and influential in an exhaustive way.

Core Values

Brand marketing is building awareness of your business. And your core values in it make brand building authentic and credible. Remember, your consumers and prospects crave meaningful marketing messages that are ethical and of help to them. They need to connect to your humane values and beliefs. Your vision and mission strengthen your values in pursuing your goals and dreams of building a brand that can impact your industry and niche by bringing practical and functional digital strategies and tools.

Values limit compromising your dignity and integrity, as sometimes seen on some social media platforms that most Gen Z describe as too competitive and emotionally draining to the detrimental effect of losing oneself, feeling inadequate, and failing in life and business. That way, losing self-belief and losing one’s values in life and business. Loss of values leads to drug use and misusing oneself in the name of self-promotion and-gratification, which is the short-term, not long term that promotes solid brand building.

Purpose

What is your purpose on any of your social media platforms? If you can’t answer that, you are more of a consumer than a creator on all your social media platforms. They say when the why is unclear, the how becomes difficult to define. How can you promote yourself when you are consuming without a clear objective in your content consumption? You end up burning out and overwhelmed with the obsession of other users’ numbers with no clarity in your own purpose that gives you the power to stick to your values. For social media focuses on the individual’s appeal in beauty, glamour and material flouts that has left most young people with depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

Where there is no purpose, there is no reality, especially in entrepreneurship, where real goals and dreams can be realized and fulfilled in life and business. A purpose-driven mindset makes any entrepreneur and creator understand themselves and what they are doing. That way, finding joy in the whole brand building process and journey.

Value

Value creation is not viral and an overnight sensation and achievement, like the common virality expected on social media platforms. It never happens in a sprint, but an overhaul of strategic planning in delivering and giving value without targeting wild numbers and virality of the content created except your inner driver and passion in what you are offering. Most social media platforms base their brand marketing on virality and instant dopamine gratification through likes and comments.

That is why most pioneer social media users are coming to a grind and wondering up to when with the addictive doses of social media in the name of self-promotion. Should marketing be about Tik Toking, Instagraming, or Tweeting? Free dances, photo shoots, and controversial tweets hardly build real value that enables sustainable brand building in the market. Most social media marketing is traumatization for monetization, with influencer marketing on social media platforms making consumers believe in unrealistic presentations of lifestyle that stifle the real world of digital marketing in the creative digital economy.

So, how best can you self-promote your value in the market? Focus on the process and journey in value creation for solid brand building. Believe in long-term marketing strategies like blog marketing, not instant self-promotions and gratification that comes with vanity metrics of likes and comments. It's time, therefore, to rethink social media in favor of a more professional representation of yourself and your brand in the digital global market.