The Keys to Driving Brand Awareness Through Social Media

Now, more than ever, brands need to fight and claw to get seen, remain relevant, and retain customers — especially online. One of the most effective tools to engage potential customers and boost brand awareness is through social media. 

Social media had humble beginnings, but it's evolved into something above and beyond what anyone could have predicted over time. Today, it's become standard protocol for top brands looking to compete for customer attention online and now has a solidified slot on the marketer's toolbelt. 

Now, that doesn't mean it's easier. In fact — it's only getting harder. Establishing and maintaining a strong social presence takes planning and work. It's personal, responsive, transparent, and potentially volatile if handled poorly. 

For the world at large, it's an informal press release and a direct line to the day to day operations, customer service, R&D, and news about your brand. It's a place to make announcements, share stories, connect with customers, and so much more. 

So, how do you craft a social media strategy that drives brand awareness? That's what we're here to help you uncover. Businesses, both big and small, can take advantage of our tips and tricks to get the most out of their social media efforts.

1. Basics Are Important

Whether your current social media tactics aren't getting the job done or you're starting from scratch, you should make sure your foundations are solid. 

Your branding, voice, tone, and core values should all be a part of your social media presence, but it should also be prominent in your profiles. Your photo, avatar, banner images, header photos, bio, location, or contact information — everything should be updated to reflect your company and brand. One tip: Don’t talk about yourself, talk about how you help. 

Your social media needs some unique flair or personality that makes it stand out in the endless crowd of profiles and accounts. The same can be said for the content posted on your channels. Every platform is different and caters to its own audience type, with varying levels of professionalism vs. casualism. If you're wondering where to spend your brand's effort, check out our tips for choosing the right platform for your company. 

2. Get to Know Your Audience 

This step is crucial for every area of branding, and it's especially crucial for social media success. Shouting into the void isn't going to get you the brand awareness you crave. Instead, you should be shouting at a very select audience. 

Social media is like carefully crafting a little world. People will populate it with their friends, people they find entertaining, topics that interest them, and content that they enjoy. Social media strategies should look to intersect people at natural or organic crossroads. For example, if you're a clothing brand, you'll want to target an audience that is interested in fashion and follows style profiles. 

Getting to know and defining your audience is a crucial first step, and it will help narrow your efforts and keep your social media presence purposeful. 

3. Stick With the Times 

Taking a look at what's in store for the future of social media and content marketing at large helps point brands in the right direction. Where's it at now? Where is it headed? What evergreen ideologies and practices have been here since the beginning? 

Answering these questions helps point your social media efforts towards achieving your goals: brand awareness. 

If we look at where social media is right now, we can see that visual strategies are on top. Whether it's images that pop or videos that captivate — we can see that social media is a visual medium at the moment. 

So, where is it headed? Well, it's still going down that path, and live video is on the up and up. So, if we want to forecast the future, it's fairly obvious that visual tactics will stay on top for quite some time, garnering followings through informative, relevant, and engaging content. 

4. Engage With Your Community 

Brands can't hope to establish or foster a successful social media presence without a strong community presence. That means strong community management and actual, thoughtful engagement with your target market. You can do this through:

• Answering questions 

• Engaging in relevant dialogue 

• Shouting others out 

• Hosting giveaways and contests 

• Partnering with other brands or influencers 

These are just a few ways to stay active, but they're crucial to keeping your brand on the forefront of the "minds of the masses." 

5. Stay True to Your Values 

It's easy to fall into a hole with social media, where you end up following trends, putting up a few hashtags, and posting the same boring content just to say, "Hey, look, we have a social media presence."

The truth is, you don't have a presence; you have an account. 

You can't go through the motions with social media because it's always changing. It's a dynamic and interactive environment where relationships are formed, experiences are had, and brands can get discovered by playing a genuine role in their respective ecosystem. 

So, doing the bare minimum isn't going to accomplish much. Your social media content strategy should encompass your values and have a purpose. In this case, it's driving brand awareness. Your brand needs to shine through your social media, not by posting products or services, but through content and tactics that illustrate who your brand is. 

If you're wondering how to connect the gap — check out these seven tips for implementing company values into your branding initiatives. 

6. Stay Consistent 

Our final tip is to stay consistent, and we cannot stress this one enough. Social media growth and success takes time, and the only real way to "speed up" the process is by posting consistently. Even still, it will take a while before true brand awareness shines through. 

Most thriving brands post on multiple social media accounts multiple times per day — and it's all original content. Now, we know that's now always a possibility for small businesses, but that doesn't mean you can't stay engaged in your social media communities on a daily basis. 

You can utilize scheduling tools to ensure that you're posting every day on your various platforms, and we'd recommend checking out any of the ones on this top social media scheduling tools list. Here are some standouts:

• Hootsuite 

• Buffer 

• Sprout Social 

• Loomly

• Sendible 

Whether you're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more — many of these software systems have cross integration, giving you the ability to post across multiple platforms with one single profile. This ensures that even the smallest entrepreneur can have a consistent social media presence.

Check the Data and Evolve

Now, just because your posting consistently, that doesn't mean it's any good. So, make sure that you're spending a significant amount of time crafting a robust strategy and reviewing metrics to see what's working. The data that's readily available, either through the platform itself or third-party scheduling software, can help paint a vivid picture of where you can improve or shift your efforts towards. 

Don't ignore data. 

Social media isn't the wild west it used to be, but brands can't do much to stake a claim on any platform without evolving. So, stay malleable and keep these tips in mind as you look to boost your brand awareness on social.