Boost Brand Awareness Through Social Media

An estimated 37% of marketers say that brand awareness is their main priority this year, but many don’t know where to start. Brand awareness isn’t like your traditional measurable metrics. In fact, it may seem like a vague concept that can be complicated to track—and you aren’t wrong. Luckily, you have free technology at your fingertips that’s sole purpose is to share information and engage with others that offers many trackable metrics—social media. The benefits of creating brand awareness among your audience are endless, especially when you factor in the impact of social media.

How Social Media Can Help Create Brand Awareness

With over 3.48 billion active users, it’s no wonder that social media is looked to as a driver of brand awareness. Social media has been shown to create brand awareness by driving engagement with your online following. Whether it’s likes, comments, shares or follows, people are interacting and showing interest in your brand! When sharing content across your social platforms, you have the opportunity to drive traffic to your website and other key offers.

Getting Started

You may be new to social media and not have exactly nailed down a strategy for creating brand awareness through social media. Our advice is to take it slow and take the time to amp up your strategy to maximize brand awareness growth. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Look at Big Names in the Industry

If you’re just getting started on your brand awareness-focused social media strategy, you’ll want to look at your direct competition along with other big names in the industry. Ask yourself these questions while researching:

• What does their follower base look like?
• How often are they posting and at what time?
• How are they interacting with their audience?
• What content are they posting?
• What types of content are seeing the largest numbers of engagement?
• What pages are their posts driving back to? Their products/services pages? A contact form?

Once you find these answers, think about your own brand and how you can use this data to your advantage.

Who Are You Talking To?

Yeah, that’s right. Who are YOU talking to? Is it manufacturers or maybe accountants? Make sure you know your audience and understand what they’re looking for when they pull up their newsfeed. The more you know about your target market, the more you’ll be able to cater to their social media desires and create brand awareness.

Decide What Platforms to Use

Just because there are countless social media platforms doesn’t mean you need to use them all to grow your brand awareness. Each platform has its own purpose, and even that changes as the digital landscape grows and evolves!

Once you determine who you’re targeting on social media, find where they’re spending the majority of their time. For example, the majority of Instagram users are between the ages of 13-17, whereas most LinkedIn users are anywhere from 18-29 and up. Those LinkedIn users are most likely looking to network with other professionals or they’re looking for professional services that could help them in their business role. On the other hand, Instagrammers are sharing Facetune selfies and looking for the latest mainstream trends in the “Explore” section.

From there, narrow down the platforms that serve your audience and grow your brand awareness strategy on that social media outlet.

Fine-Tune Your Social Profiles

Woah, woah. Slow your roll there. You may know your audience and where they’re hanging out, but don’t jump in just yet. Before posting anything, make sure you fine-tune your social media profiles. This means having consistent profile images and banners across all outlets. Make sure you’re using the bio space to tell everyone who you are. Add your purpose and what you do. If you have space left, add a link to your website or maybe to a new blog post you just published.

Plan Ahead

It’s time to get planning! With a solid social profile and your target market in mind, start creating a calendar to organize your social media content. We recommend including the content type, post date and time, caption, relevant link and ideas for the visual you intend on having for each post on your calendar. This way, you’re all ready when the time comes to post. Another benefit of planning ahead using a social media content calendar is that you can share with your team ahead of time and make tweaks prior to sending it out to the world.

Be Creative

The key to getting your audience to engage with your content and create brand awareness is the creativeness of your posts. Make your audience slow their scroll with an appealing image or quick video and an engaging caption. If your business isn’t one that’s traditionally considered appealing, consider using bright colors and a custom image instead of a generic stock image.

When writing your post captions, think of your audience. Fair warning: People are picky! Some want short and witty comments on the posts they see and others may be looking for a detailed post to read. Nailing the perfect caption to draw in your audience may be tricky at first, but once you’ve got them they’re hooked. You may also think about joining the wide, wide realm of hashtags by creating your own! Even if you’re new to the social media world, you can create a few branded hashtags to accompany your posts. For example, a couple of our branded hashtags include #SyncShow and #SynchronizedInbound. Both are used on Instagram:

Trust us, creativity matters when creating brand awareness through social media.

Be Conversational

Your social media profiles should represent your brand. This means that your posts and visuals should be unique to you. They shouldn’t look or sound like everyone else. Users want to read posts that come from a human, not a robot. Take a look at that handy calendar you’ve created and see if you’d interact with a post like that on your own profile. If not, rework it. Coming off as conversational on social media can greatly benefit your brand awareness if people feel like they can connect with you. This also means interacting with your audience and responding to comments and mentions. Show your viewers you genuinely appreciate them and their opinion.

Be Consistent

People won’t be aware of your brand if they aren’t actually seeing your posts. Make sure you’re creating a consistent presence on your social media platforms of choice. If you’re not posting, then maybe your competition is.

Creating brand awareness through social media doesn’t just happen overnight. Building a strategy may take some time and tons of trial and error, but in time you’ll find your sweet spot. A lot can come from a robust brand awareness strategy. By sharing content on social media, you can humanize your brand and establish trust with your followers, as well as create recognition versus your competition. Now it’s time for you to get started.