How to boost your brand awareness online through social media

Social media is an incredibly effective way to reach people, so much so that it has created its own sub-genre of marketing. Today, if you’re looking to achieve brand awareness on a cost effective basis there are few other tools that have such an impressive impact.

Why social media works so well

The audience is huge

The sheer number of people you can reach via social media provides a very effective way to improve brand awareness. Facebook, for example, has more than 2.2 billion monthly active users in locations all over the world. Twitter has 327+ million and Instagram 800+ million.

It’s cost effective

Social media advertising can be the cheapest way to get your message out into the world and using social media profiles to post and engage is free.

It’s emotive

An authentic voice on social media can give your brand the feel of a genuine personality, which makes it much easier for people to engage with what your business is and what it’s trying to do.

It’s real time

Social media moves at lightening speed – for example more than 350,000 tweets are sent worldwide every minute. This means your brand can be responsive to customers and connected to what’s going on outside of your business too.

It’s great for story telling

Especially now that post and tweet lengths are longer, social media is an excellent forum for telling the kinds of stories that draw people to your brand.

How to use social media to boost brand awareness online

• Find your target market and use one social media platform to reach it. Focus your efforts on the social channel that suits your demographic and customers best.
• Visual content is king. If you want to stand out in the social media world then you need to be creating eye-catching content. Images and video perform well because 90% of all the information transmitted to our brains is visual. After Twitter added inline images to its format, a study by Buffer found that tweets with images get 18% more clicks, 89% more favourites and 150% more retweets.
• Keep your content consistent. If brand awareness is your objective for using social media then each piece of content and engagement needs to reflect your brand values. If you haven’t documented tone of voice and brand values for social media then it’s worth doing so, especially if your posting is being handled by different people or an external provider.
• Engage and chat. If all you’re doing is broadcasting or promoting your business then your social media efforts will like fall flat. Social media is a reciprocal thing – you need to engage to get engagement back.
• Time your posts to reach your audience. There are four key times in the day when people are most likely to scroll through social media:8am to 9am – many of us check in over breakfast or on our way to work.
  12pm to 2pm – social media over lunch is very common.
  5pm to 7pm – as people make their way home checking in with social happens once again.
  10pm to 11pm – although we’re not supposed to, large numbers of us are checking social media profiles just before we go to sleep.

At Iconic Digital we have extensive experience of using social media to help brands build profile and awareness. We can provide social strategy support, as well as the kind of high quality and consistent content that will get your brand noticed.