Are you struggling to establish brand awareness using social media marketing? In this blog post, we go over five best practices to optimize your brand’s online presence.
Building brand awareness on social media can be challenging, especially in highly competitive industries. How can you stand out from the competition and successfully engage your audience?
Here are a few powerful strategies you can implement to maximize your brand awareness on social media:
1. Be Unique
Raising brand awareness is all about standing out from the crowd. So using the same strategies that everyone else is employing is of course not going to work!
💡Ready to get started with your social media marketing strategy? Feel free to download our free Social Media Starter Kit for Professionals where we share tips and best practices to help you drive engagement on social media!
How will your brand stand out if it’s online presence is just like any other brand, how can you get audiences to identify with your brand in particular?
Moonpie did it with humor. With funny replies and takes on current events, they became one of the most popular brands to follow on Twitter in 2017. For example, have a look at this tweet posted on the Fourth of July this year:
Using human emotions such as humor, surprise, sadness or compassion will help your brand stand out and connect with audiences. Social media is where companies can relate to audiences on a personal level – so make the most of this strategy!
2. Build an Employee Advocacy Strategy
The larger your engaged followership on social media, the easier it is to get the word out about your brand.
But growing a receptive audience on social media takes lots of time and efforts so how can you improve your organic social media reach right now?
The easiest way is through employee advocacy, the process of helping employees to share brand and industry-related content on social media. This tactic is about way more than just getting a bigger reach. Studies show that people tend to distrust corporate messages: 42% of people distrust brands and 69% distrust advertising.
Messages from your employees will carry far more credibility than those from your corporate social accounts. Tools like Smarp make it easy for your employees to find informative content and share your messages with their networks.
3. Reach Out to Influencers
What if you could get access to millions of engaged social media users without spending a dollar on advertising? Think about it: by asking top social media influencers to share your content, you could considerably improve your brand awareness.
A single tweet from a top influencer in your industry with hundreds of thousands of followers can drive some serious traction for your brand.
Also, when top influencers share your content, it immediately increases your brand credibility. Influencers will be happy to share your content if you can collaborate with them on blog posts or webinars for example.
4. Tailor Your Content
Companies want to build a brand presence on as many platforms as possible. But because their social media teams have limited resources, they often share the same thing on different channels.
There are 3 major problems with this approach:
– A post that works well on LinkedIn might completely fall flat on Instagram because audiences expect different things from different channels.
– Using every single social media platform may not be relevant to your brand. B2C brands could do very well on Instagram but have little meaning for prospective customers on LinkedIn.
– People who follow you on more than one channel will begin to view you as being repetitive. Not a good thing for your brand image, right?
Repurposing content is a great idea, only if you tailor your message to the platform.
Create posts specific to each social media platform, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, using Twitter to convey detailed reports isn’t a great idea. Using it to promote an infographic about your reports will do far better!
Related: How to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy
Customizing content for each platform may seem like a tedious task, but it leads to much more effective marketing. That’s when people start viewing you as a brand, rather than just a company.
Whenever you create new content, make sure you structure it in a way that you can easily repurpose it so you can maximize the impact of your marketing efforts!
Also, make sure that your social media campaign plan includes clear goals and objectives so you know what content to repurpose on which channels.
5. Capitalize on Viral Trends
Raising brand awareness begins with reaching new people. One way to do that is to go where people are. In other words, join existing conversations. Keep an eye out for any new trends that are taking over the web and capitalize on the increased activity there.
For example, here’s a recent tweet by Oreo that jumps into a trending conversation about Pokemon:
Be adaptable enough to alter your strategies according to what the market wants at a particular point in time.
Conclusion
Growing your brand’s reach on social media becomes far easier if you build a unique voice, use employee advocacy tactics, engage with influencers to share your content, tailor your brand content to specific social media channels and talk about viral trends.
These strategies could prove to be the difference between a viral campaign that captures the hearts of your audience, and a promotion attempt that generates little traction.
