How to Use Social Media to Increase Brand Awareness

Connect with your audience on a personal level while they discover your brand and hopefully become customers.

While it can be a fun way to connect to loved ones, social media also serves a very practical purpose for marketers: brand awareness. Awareness is, after all, the key first step in the customer journey. According to a 2021 report from Sprout Social, 58% of polled marketers stated their biggest goal for social media was to increase their company's brand awareness. Other goals included community engagement (41%) and growing their audiences (35%) - which all lead to building a strong customer base. So, that lends the question: how does social media help increase brand awareness?

The simple answer to that question is that it takes the place of more expensive, less relevant media types such as billboards, magazines, and other print advertising. You have to meet your clients, customers, and audience where they are and where they are is on social media. There are an estimated 3.6 billion social media users worldwide (as of 2020). That's a HUGE potential customer reach in comparison to paid localized media, especially when 67% of consumers are more likely to spend more with a brand they follow on social media (Sprout Social).

Using social media for brand awareness is much more than just posting cute cat pictures on Instagram (although there is plenty of that, too). It's about knowing your buyer personas inside and out so that you can focus your work on the sites they frequent. For example, if your main customer is a female in her mid-forties that is a working parent, statistics will show that you want to have a strong focus on creating content on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Facebook is still the largest social media channel, with an estimated 2.7 billion active users per month, and 44% of those users are female. It's important to understand all the social media channels available and keep up-to-date with their demographics. Each channel does keep pretty exact analytics, and the information is readily available through other statistic sites like Sprout Social and Statista.

So, how can you increase your brand awareness through social media? Here are three areas you might want to focus on.

Showcase your brand's personality. Make sure your voice is unique and interesting to your audience. You want to make sure you have repeat viewers and that they share your content. Post fun pictures and think outside the box when it comes to discovering your social media personality. On a regular basis, evaluate which posts are most active and go back and create other posts like that. This will also help build your social media voice and keep your audience coming back for more.
Use hashtags and tag others. This is very important, and you want to make sure that you get your posts noticed. Hashtags and tagging others help start the conversation. Check to see what hashtags in your industry are being followed the most and add them to your post (you can do this by Googling "trending hashtags for XXX," where XXX is the channel you are targeting). There is also nothing wrong with creating unique hashtags (this helps with brand personality, too) to have fun with your audience. Tagging other accounts also makes your post visible to their followers in most cases. This expands your audience and might help you pick up some new customers.
Repurpose your content. This one is huge. It helps to extend the life of content you've already created, and it gives you content for other channels. For example, if you've created a blog about how analytics helps your marketing plans, you might want to turn that into an infographic and post it on a visual medium like Pinterest.

Social Media is incredibly important to your brand's overall marketing strategy because it focuses on the first tier of the customer buyer journey: awareness. It's a place for your customers and clients to get to know you as more than just a place to spend money. Let them connect with you on a more personal level and make it a conversation! No one wants to visit a social media site that is only preaching sales...sales...sales. Incorporate all kinds of posts and make it fun. Ask questions. Point out important moments in history that tie into your brand's mission. Call out customers when they share your business. Thank your clients publicly. Social media gives us the privilege of being able to connect with our customers. So, take advantage of it.