Building a brand, choosing its identity through logos and taglines isn’t as simple as it sounds, but once you have conquered who you are, it’s time to tell the world. While youtube is a social network, to limit your newly minted brand to just what traffic youtube can provide would be a shame. We’re going to cover why brand unification is necessary and how to achieve it.
The brand you set up on youtube can be used on other social media sites as well. Doing this will not only make it easier to organize; it will also unite your brand across social media platforms. And with each site —facebook, google plus, twitter, instagram, pinterest, vine, linkedin, tumblr and many many more — giving you access to a different slice of the public, unifying your brand will also make promoting your brand easier. Being able to address what you do with one name, not a different one depending on what site you go on, can be a great strength.
Lets take a look at two different brands the episodic series red vs blue and the comedian grace helbig.
Lets look at each of their youtube sites side by side. The both look nice, represent what they have to offer in their artwork, and their usernames are their brand names.
Now lets look at just red vs blue, comparing it to the other social media outlets they participate in. As you can see, with youtube, facebook and google+ have the same logo and fonts and they all share the same usernames. Their instagram page is a bit different, but still has the same username.
By contrast, lets look at grace helbig’s social media pages. Lets start with the strengths. Every one of her sites have the same username, however the branding is all over the place. The good thing about that is that the artwork can be changed, but usernames you’re stuck with. Comparing the youtube page to the facebook page, absolutely nothing is the same in the art. The banners are different, the fonts are different and even the user photo is different. This is the theme across the twitter page as well. However the tumblr account has the same banner as the youtube page.
The big take away from brand unification is to make it so no matter how a user is accessing your content, the user experience is similar. This will allow for the branding to become more familiar to each user when accessing it, making it more recognizable even out of context.
Here is a simple checklist to use to cover all of your bases.
Settle on a logo and create several versions of it for each of your social media accounts.
Make sure your tag line is consistent wherever it appears. Try to avoid slight variations of the same thing.
Since banners will all be different dimensions each place they appear, preview every instance of it on several devices, including a desktop computer, tablet, smartphone and even smart tv.
Ensure that colors are consistent. For example, rather than making sure they’re all blue, make sure they all have the exact shade of blue by comparing them side by side.
So there you have it, by keeping your brand unified across all platforms; social media or otherwise, you gain the ability to make a longer lasting impression. You’re offering brand reinforcement to each user through your brand unification.
