How to: increase your brand awareness using social media
Brand awareness is crucial and social media is a great place to increase your brand awareness and should form a large part of your visibility strategy.
As well as content creation and distribution there are a number of other ways that you ensure that you get the attention of your potential clients and customers who are using social media.
1. Use visual content
We have blogged a lot about using visual content. Visual content is simply more engaging to the average social media user. Use of visual content on noisy feeds such as Twitter is more likely to attract attention and a high quality or interesting photograph on Instagram is more likely to stand out than generic stock photography.
Build up your collection of visual content by taking more photographs, using curated stock photography and creating your own graphics and images specifically for social media.
Further Reading: How to Create Engaging Content on Social Media
2. Develop a voice and personality on social media
On social media, it is important that you come across as authentic and human. Therefore, you should let your personality shine through. If you are posting on behalf of a business it is important that you have an agreed tone of voice (and brand guidelines) if there are multiple people managing the accounts. By developing a voice and a personality people are much more likely to engage with you (and remember you). It is also important to take the platform you are using into account and you may find that you have different tones for different platforms (and different audiences).
Further Reading: 4 steps to help you develop your brand tone of voice
3. Don’t post the same content across all your social media channels. Mix it up!
We are all guilty of this. Particularly when you are not a social media or marketing professional. You just want to save time and therefore it can be easy to share the same piece of content or other information across all your social channels. However, if you plan properly you can quickly create slightly different content for each of your media platforms with a unique message.
4. Share great content
Great content speaks for itself. You want your brand to be associated with great content. This should be both your own content and curated content that is in line with your brand and on message with your target audience in mind.
Further Reading: How to create engaging content on social media
5. Use consistent branding across all social media channels and your website
Create brand guidelines and stick to them.
Define the colours and fonts that your company uses for its branding and always use those in a consistent manner. Use the same logos and profile images. Ensure your branding is consistent across all your social media sites, as well as your website and blog. Consistency helps people more easily recognise you and increases brand awareness.
Further Reading: Invest in Brand Guidelines for Consistent Execution
6. Follow and engage with influencers
Find your industry influencers and follow them on social media. Listen to what they are talking about. Engage with them on social and take every chance you get to interact with them as well as their followers via comments, answers to questions, etc. This can be particularly useful to develop your own reputation as a thought-leader and find potential leads in your industry.
On the other hand if you are a product business you might want to develop your relationships and work with key influencers as a way to market your product and raise awareness of your brand (to ultimately help increase sales).
Further Reading: How to work with influencers
7. Ask and Answer Questions
Thought-Leadership and engaging in discussions is a great way to increase your brand awareness.
Post questions or polls to your followers to start conversations or debates on specific topics. Post answers to Frequently Asked Questions and
As well as blogging and posting on social media to ask and answer questions another channel that can form part of your social media strategy can be answering questions on Quora as this can be a great way to increase brand awareness and drive traffic back to your website.
Further Reading: Use Twitter Polls to Boost Engagement
8. Hold contests or competitions
This can be anything. However, it works better if you can tie it in with your brand, product or service. To also increase your reach as much as possible it should also be something very shareable.
Depending on your social media platform of choice you will have a different strategy when is comes to running a contest.
Further Reading: 7 Instagram Contest Ideas to Grow Brand Awareness
Further Reading: How to run a successful Twitter Contest
9. Blogging
If you don’t have a blog, start one.
Creating blog posts will help you build an audience as well as give you some great personalised content to share. Share your posts across your social media channels. If people like it, they will share it.
Additionally, if you are keen to raise your profile as a thought-leader or expert, having your own blog can also help with this visibility strategy.
Further Reading: How to be a blogging pro.
10. Guest blogging
If you enjoy writing you might also want to consider guest blogging to raise your brand awareness.
A lot of blogs will accept guest posts from bloggers who write about similar topics. Guest blogging can help raise your brand awareness on social media as each of you will share the content across your social channels, which can massively boost your exposure.
Further Reading: Blogging: An Introduction.