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Whether you are a fashion brand launching a new campaign, a fintech company balancing paid and organic strategies, or a B2B startup selling your SaaS product—brand awareness plays a crucial role in deciding success. And when it comes to brand awareness, nothing comes close to the reach, insights, and engagement you can get from social media.
However, cutting through the noise on almost content-saturated social media platforms takes work. Fortunately, there are a few proven ways to grow your brand awareness through social media. In this article, we are sharing eight of such practical and impactful strategies:
The Power of Social Media for Brand Awareness
Social media has long shaped the rules of marketing. Today, more than ever, people interact with brands on social media.
Consider this: 53.6% of the world’s population is on social media. That’s why 89% of B2B marketers use the platforms as their primary marketing strategy.
Every successful brand, from Mercedes-Benz to M&M, uses social media to instill positive brand identity in their target audience. When used right, it can become an indispensable tool for building brand awareness. Here are three important ways it does so:
- Lead generation: Social media is an ideal lead generation platform that allows you to reach a new audience. Plus, it gives you crucial insights into exactly what people are looking for from brands like yours, thus improving the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts.
- Ideas for content strategy: Trends start from social media, and successful content strategies leverage current trends, topics, and interests to capture the audience’s attention. Therefore, it helps you develop engaging content that converts.
- Cost-effectiveness: Social media platforms cost you nothing to promote your brand with much better ROI. Even if you opt for sponsored ads, they are relatively inexpensive than other traditional efforts.
8 Impactful Ways to Use Social Media to Grow Your Brand Awareness
Now, onto the eight promised impactful social media branding strategies to help you boost brand awareness:
Understand Your Audience
IT director John might not be scrolling through Instagram to find the next great IT solution–or maybe he is. It’s for you to identify.
Conduct proper research to find everything about your audience, including:
- Demographics: Location, age, income bracket, and education level
- Psychographics: Interests, hobbies, lifestyle, and values
- Social media behavior: preferred platforms, activity pattern, and content preference.
- Engagement: interaction style, tone, and voice
This will form the foundation of your social media branding strategy. Based on this information, choose the platforms where your audience spends the most time.
Don’t try to manage all social media platforms–Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter (X), and Snapchat—you’ll burn out soon. Identify which platforms your users are active on. Based on this information, use a social media scheduler to schedule posts at optimal times for better results.
Next, align your social media strategy with business objectives, like brand awareness.
A shortcut is to keep an eye on your competitor’s social media activities. Monitor their platforms, content, and performance, and mold your efforts accordingly.
Create Your Social Media Branding Kit
A social media branding kit houses all the tools and data you need to create an impactful and consistent social media presence across platforms. It includes:
- An overview of the company
- Branding guidelines: brand logo, color scheme, tone, font options, content style, and ideal consumer persona
- Your social media pages
- Your social media guidelines
- Hashtags relevant to your products and services
- Company’s top 5 most engaged posts in the last month by number of mentions
This will streamline social media marketing processes and establish a clear brand identity and voice. However, ensure the kit is available company-wide, not just to the social media or marketing team. This way, you will help provide a consistent brand experience to users across all touchpoints.
Perform Social Media Listening and Address the Mentions
To maintain a positive brand image, you must have a bird’ s-eye view of what people are talking about your brand and the type of content that’s created and shared.
Be aware of the conversations people are having about your brand and the news that circulates without your control. Such mentions often shape the quality of your brand awareness.
Fortunately, you don’t have to track these conversations and mentions manually—how long will that take, if it’s even possible? Artificial intelligence tools allow you to keep a close tab on everything that’s happening around your brand on social media. It’s called social listing.
It helps you identify customers who are interested in your products but do not know your brand yet. You can train the tools to track specific keywords (for example, sports shoes, if you produce them) to find out who is looking for them on social media.
This way, you can run targeted ads towards the prospects, putting your brand and product in their feeds.
Social listening, however, goes beyond it. It lets you track mentions in posts, stories, and even comments. So, if a user has a question about a specific product or your brand in general, you can answer it (ideally within one hour)—thus boosting brand awareness.
Engage, Engage, and Engage
You can post the most valuable content for your users, but the results won’t be impressive until you engage with them in real time.
Tune into your audience’s conversation and engage with them. Respond to their comments, reply to messages, and share story mentions on your feed.
Here are a few more ways to spark engagement and interaction:
- Host giveaways of your products or collaborate in giveaways with other companies
- Get creative with Instagram poll questions to foster real-time interactions and build personal connection
- Share user-generated content, as this will encourage more users to participate and contribute to your brand awareness
- Share behind-the-scenes to humanize your brand
- Offer exclusive content and discounts (an incentive to engage with your brand)
Prioritize in-feed consumption
People like to consume all the content from their preferred platform. If you consistently redirect them to multiple external links, chances are they’ll skip over to the next post without even viewing yours.
To prevent this, create content that’s easy to consume on the platform. Such content encourages more engagement.
Platform algorithms also prioritize content that keeps users on the platform. Since posts in the feed are the first thing users see after logging in, they’re prime real estate to catch attention. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram also allow product tagging within posts.
By integrating your store with social media, you can create shoppable social media posts.
This way, users can buy by simply clicking on the tagged product, thus making the buyer journey easier and increasing brand awareness and sales through social media. By choosing to embed Instagram feed on your website, you can showcase your social media content directly to your visitors, further enhancing engagement and visibility
An online store can be a key part of your social media branding strategy since it’ll allow you to:
- Display products with high-quality images and descriptions
- Integrate social sharing features
- Highlight review social media post from customers to build trust and credibility
So, leverage the real estate to share your brand story and relevant content. You can even sell via social media using features like Facebook marketplaces. This creates more opportunities for you to keep the algorithm happy while building brand awareness and increasing sales.
Digital influencers are the new stars. According to a recent survey, 61% of consumers are more likely to be influenced by influencers than brand-produced content (38%).
It also makes sense. Given influencers’ huge followings and authenticity, consumers tend to trust them more (in most cases) than brands since they make personalized connections more efficiently.
Thus, collaborate or partner with relevant influencers in your industry or niche. Ensure their audience aligns with your target customers. In addition to increasing your brand awareness and putting your products in front of a new audience, the influencers will also help drive traffic to your social media profiles.
Even better, AI influencers can be added to your strategy. AI influencers, like Shudu or LilMiqueal, have amassed humongous following and engagement. Working with them, you’ll have complete control over the content and narrative.
Moreover, collaborating with them will position you as a tech-savvy brand that appeals to the forward-thinking audience. Here’s an example of Miquela (an AI influencer) working with Prada.
YouTube video link: PRADA CANDY – RETHINK REALITY – SENSATIONS
Use Hashtags to Increase Brand Awareness
Investing in hashtags has stood the test of time. Did you know that using hashtags can get you 29% more interactions on Instagram? The report also showed that posts with 11+ hashtags garner more interaction.
And it’s not just Instagram: every social media platform rewards relevant hashtag usage. By leveraging them, you can increase engagement and reach. They also help users discover your content and guide you to a target audience interested in your niche.
Take the example of the hashtag #IceBucketChallenge by the ALS Association. The campaign helped the company to increase both medical and brand awareness.
Therefore, create branded hashtags and use relevant hashtags in your social media content. However, don’t go overboard. Stick to a few hashtags that describe your post. Follow platform-specific hashtag best practices.
Leverage Automation
From posting trendy content to monitoring and tracking all the relevant content, it takes a village to win social media platforms and give you the desired results.
Fortunately, social media automation exists. For example, using LinkedIn outreach automation tools, you can streamline your LinkedIn marketing and networking efforts. The automation will allow you to find and connect with potential clients, partners, and employees.
Similarly, automated chatbots respond to messages and questions, even outside business hours, thus improving overall customer service. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You can consider automating:
- Content scheduling and posting
- Content creation as per industry trends
- Social listening and monitoring
- Payments on social media marketplaces
- Analytics and Reporting
- Chatbots and customer service
- Engagement and interaction
So, identify the needs of your business and automate all the elements of social media branding that you can. Social media automation can also enhance your branding strategy. One efficient way is using an AI tweet generator from platforms like Circleboom to create, design, and schedule engaging tweets effortlessly, helping you stay consistent and relevant.
Social Media Branding: In Conclusion
Social media is a long-term game. You can’t expect to see the results of your efforts from the next day. However, consistent strategies will give you impeccable results–even beyond your expectations. But only when done right.
The eight strategies shared above are a sure-shot way to put you on the right path. Moving forward, customize them as your brand and audience evolve–your brand awareness metrics will soon start showing inspiring impacts.
