18 Proven Ways to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media

Over the years, social media has become one of the best channels to increase brand awareness. Almost all well-known brands are active on these platforms to spread the word about their names, and some, sell their products on social media too.

Standing at the top of the marketing funnel, awareness is the first thing that brands need to take care of. The more people know about the brand, the more they are willing to purchase after all.

Raising awareness around a brand is not just to get people to identify your logo, slogan, and color palette. It’s also about knowing about more important things such as your mission, vision, the overall feeling around your brands, and of course, the winning features that make you unique.

There are many ways to increase brand awareness through social media and we’re going to cover the best methods in this article.

So, buckle up and keep reading.

Table of Contents

• Why You Should Invest in Social Media to Increase Brand Awareness?
• How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media?

Why You Should Invest in Social Media to Increase Brand Awareness?

Before we show you how to increase your social media brand awareness, it’s important to know why you should invest your energy, time, and money on these platforms.

Reason #1: People Love Social Media

In 2022, 4.59 billion people all around the world are using social media. This number is estimated to increase by 21% by 2027. These figures are certainly impressive enough to not be ignored by all brands in different sizes and niches.

Source: Statista

Social media are heavily based on visual content which makes them perfect for brand building and increasing brand awareness.

Two-way communication, reading other people’s comments, and the comfortability of use almost everywhere and anytime with just a couple of taps make social media even more attractive for marketers.

Reason #2: People Tend to Connect with Brands on Social Media

Not only do they love social media, but people also tend to buy their stuff on social platforms.

90% of people who use social media have at least one business account followed. That shows people are willing to use social media as an online shopping center.

In fact, 67% of consumers expect brands and companies to have social media presence to provide customer service.

That’s why popular social media such as Facebook and Instagram have added shopping features directly into their apps.

Reason #3: Using Social Media is Cost-efficient

Compared to traditional ways of increasing brand awareness, such as TV commercials and newspapers, or even word-of-mouth, social media is much more cost-efficient.

It’s free to have a business page on most platforms. Also, with a little bit of creativity, brands can run their virtual branch on social media way more efficiently than brick-and-mortar branches. Not to mention that many brands only operate online.

How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media?

Here are 18 brand awareness strategies on social media that every brand needs to consider:

1- Choose the Best Social Media Platforms

First thing first! Which social media is best for brand awareness?

Although it’s persuasive for brands to have business accounts on every famous social media platform, it’s not always the wisest strategy; especially for those brands that have a limited budget.

That’s why it’s better to focus on a few social media channels to start.

The goal of using social media is to find a place where your targeted audiences are most active. That’s why you need to know exactly who the audience is and specifically, who’s your customer persona.

For example, if you are a green brand that offers environmentally-friendly products and helps save oceans, maybe it’s time to do some TikTok marketing, why?

TikTok users are mostly from Gen Z who are very conscious about their online purchases and the effects that they have on the environment. That’s why TikTok can be a good place to start making valuable content to increase your brand awareness through social media.

The same logic goes for choosing other platforms. If your audience mostly consists of adults, maybe Facebook is a better choice.

If you are not sure how to define your target audience, it’s time to conduct a brand audit.

Pro Tip: If you already have social media accounts, make sure you check existing social media insights and maybe run a social media audit to have a better picture of your current social media strategy.

2- Invest in Influencers

Yes, Kylie Jenner charges around one million dollars per post on her Instagram, but that’s just one big example of influencer marketing on social media.

They have a long history of partnership with businesses to spread awareness about the brands and they have different names: brand evangelists, brand ambassadors, or mostly known on social media by the term “influencers.”

Surely, celebrities are just a part of this industry that we all know as influencer marketing. Luckily, many people started to use social media to build personal brands in any niche you would imagine.

That’s why you can always choose the right influencer that can promote your brand.

Types of Influencers

Generally, there are a few types of influencers by the count of followers, mainly including:

• Mega or celebrity influencers (1M+ followers)
• Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
• Micro-influencers (10K–100K followers)
• Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)

The good news is, to increase brand awareness, it’s not always better to work with super famous faces in the top tiers. In fact, micro-influencer have a higher engagement rate than mega-influencers.

That may sound a little bit weird at first, but the reason is that nano-influencers and micro-influencers have a more close-knit community than celebrities. That’s why the follower tends to trust them and naturally, the engagement rate would increase too.

The influencers’ connections are so precious that even some well-known brands such as Daniel Wellington — which have no difficulty acquiring famous people to promote their brand awareness — started to focus on micro-influencer marketing.

Source: Instagram

There are many different ways to collaborate with influencers, such as:

• Send them freebies from your product and ask them to unpack, use them, and share the experience on their social (in the example mentioned, DW is sending influencers free watches);
• Be the sponsor for their events, shows, or podcast
• Invite them to your company events

3- Perform Social Media Listening & Address the Mentions

To have a bird-eye picture of your brand on social media, you have to control the content that is created and shared.

But it’s also essential to take care of the content and conversations that other people are producing about your brand which is circulating without your control.

After all, they are contributing to shaping the quality of your brand awareness, aren’t they?

That seems like a lot of work, and it is. But thanks to artificial intelligence, you can now access every single conversation on social media that is happening about your brand. It’s called social listening.

Why is social listening important for your brand awareness?

Using this method, you can immediately find out about any feedback or questions that people might have and answer them ASAP.

Imagine a potential customer is interested in the type of products or services that you offer but does not know about your brand. You can track a specific keyword on social media related to your business, to find out who’s on social media looking for that good/service.

This way, you can offer them your product, or answer their question.

Pro Tip: It’s better to answer social media comments and mentions within one hour since social media users are not very patient!

Luckily, there are many AI tools available that can automate this process for you. Let’s take a quick look at Mentionlytics and what it can offer to help you increase your brand awareness.

Social Listening Using Mentionlytics

Not only does Mentionlytics’ media monitoring services offer you an all-in-one dashboard to surveillance all of your social media such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, but also it can scan the whole web for your keyword of interest.

You can check all the brand social mentions, social media insights, and even assign and label the comments for your social media team to take care of them faster and more effectively.

Another exceptional feature of this app is Social Intelligence Advisor or SIA. It gives you recommendations based on the content around your brand.

For example, if negative comments about your brand/keyword increase in a certain time, it will alarm you about it, so you can control the situation at the very early stages of the crisis.

Try Mentionlytics for free to test its other useful features such as

• Sentiment analysis;
• Social media reports;
• Review monitoring;
• and many more

4- Run Awareness Ads on Social Media

One of the concrete and effective ways to increase brand awareness through social media is to run ads.

The good thing is that your daily budget can be as low as $1.

The manageable and versatile budgeting for social media ads is different from platform to platform, but there’s one important aspect that you should always consider before running ads:

Make sure your ad is original, high-quality, and engaging enough.

As social media goes more video-based, so do the ads. How many times did you watch a short ad video even without sound on your feed?

That shows how much a single video, although silenced most of the time, can be engaging.

Pro Tip: A very common practice for marketers with a full-funnel approach is to create a set of nine short videos. The first three are focusing on raising brand awareness, the next ones are focusing on customers’ decision-making and final purchase.

As you can tell, it’s always better to start your marketing efforts at the very top of the funnel, which is brand awareness.

5- Collaborate with other Brands

Have a brand friend on social media? Are your products/services complementary or going well together? Then why not collaborate and help each other grow?

Some platforms, such as Instagram, and of course its parent company Facebook (now Meta) enable business accounts to run partnership posts.

Source: Instagram

These types of posts appear in both pages’ timelines, featuring both accounts’ profiles. This way, all the followers of brand A would also see brand B on their feed and vice versa.

6- Giveaways

Nothing is quite more pleasing and noise-making than winning in a competition, isn’t it? Then why not give your audience something to make a buzz around your brand? That would boost brand awareness on social media.

Let’s see how.

Many brands on Instagram use this method to give their account a sharp boost of engagement. The engagement that accounts receive during these Giveaway times is like injecting adrenaline through your social media veins.

Source: Instagram

The mechanism is simple, they mostly include

• Step 1: Revealing and announcing a worthy prize on social media. Usually, brands use their own products/services. This can be either one of your own products/services or even a discount on them.
• Step 2: Publishing information about the giveaway, including rules and time. For example, to win the prize, the followers have to share the post or mention three of their followers in the comments.
• Step 3: performing the draw, and announcing the winner

Wait, it’s not finished yet! Some brands ask the winner to take a photo with the prize and publish it on their feed. This is one extra step to increase brand awareness however possible.

7- Run UGC Campaigns Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media

User-generated content or UGC is one of the best types of marketing campaigns to increase your brand awareness through social media and also, will strengthen your brand community.

This campaign works simply: You ask your audience to tag you or use specific hashtags, whenever they share a photo while they’re using your product and services.

At the first glance, this might not seem like a good strategy for increasing brand awareness, since the people who share your brand using your hashtags are clearly already familiar with your brand.

But hold your horses…

The thing is, almost all of these users have their own follower base, and by sharing and mentioning your products, their followers would also learn about your brand.

Also, when you share their post on your own feed/story, they also repost it and some of their friends will actually come and engage with that content.

See how GoPros runs its UGCs campaigns at the finest level:

Source: Instagram

From another point of view, when your own followers see how people actually are happy using your products/services, they might learn more about them and more audience will convert to customers in your marketing funnel.

8- Use Hashtags to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media

Old but gold! Hashtagging is still alive — and actually, still powerful.

On Instagram, If you use only one hashtag on a post, you’ll get 29% more interactions.

Hashtags are designed to make finding and navigating things easier on social media.

One of the best examples of hashtag campaigns to increase both brand awareness and medical awareness was #IceBucketChallenge by ALS Association.

Too many hashtags won’t work anymore, so, make sure you use the optimal number of hashtags for each platform.

Pro Tip: You can use hashtag tracking tools such as Mentionlytics to check all the hashtags or any phrase that you like on all popular social media and have them in just one dashboard.

9- Use Fun Language to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media

Let’s face it, people don’t follow a business page on social media to learn just about the brand. You should make the experience fun for them so that they have the incentives to engage and help you raise awareness on social media around your brand.

One of the best ways to create this differentiation is using a little bit of fun in your social media. Remember, social media is primarily a place to socialize, not a market to sell your products.

10- Post about Trending Topics

Make sure you contribute your voice when it comes to trending topics.

Twitter is the best platform to check trending topics. Twitter is all about what’s happening now!

The Covid-19 pandemic, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter movements are all good examples of trending topics.

As you can see, the trending topic might not be exactly in the scope of your activity, but it’s a good idea to find the right angle to look at it from your own perspective.

Speaking of trending topics, let’s have a look at some of the seasonal trending topics as an opportunity to increase your brand awareness in the next section.

11- Make the most of the Event Calendar

Some occasions such as Christmas, Halloween, Black Friday, and New Year are great opportunities to run seasonal brand awareness campaigns. Make sure you won’t miss these occasions.

Source: Instagram

12- Invest in Creating Trending Videos/Reels

If you have a killer idea for a short video, and a solid follower base to share it with, go ahead and try making one!

You’ll never know if your short reel or the challenge that you started goes viral or not, but analyzing the viral content on social, here’re some common elements they have:

• Short & Sweet Length (usually less than one minute)
• Featuring people and cute animals
• Clear point
• Often, they are fun to watch
• Follow a special pattern
• Sometimes they are loop videos
• And music!

Getting videos and reels viral is so vital that some record companies made their singers make viral videos featuring the song on social media (especially on TikTok and Instagram). And only after the success of the video, did they allow the song to be published. Crazy, right?

13- Don’t Post the Same Content On Every Channel

This is one of the most common mistakes that brands do on social media — especially those with limited budgets and time.

You have to know that each social media channel is different than the other and so you’re content should.

Twitter is designed and used for more text-based and kind of urgent news and state of mind kind of social media, whereas, Instagram is the best for sharing photos, and TikTok is for reels.

By changing both your content and format, you’ll promote your brand using unique content tailored for audiences’ in each platform.

Read more: Improve Brand Awareness Visibility with Content marketing

14- Ask Your Audience to Engage

Engagement on social media is the key to getting more visibility and as a result, higher brand awareness of course.

In addition to creating high-quality content, there are simple tricks that you can do to improve your engagement. Asking your audience to like and share — or even better, leave a comment — is one of those simple hacks.

That’s why you have to make sure that the social media content team always includes a clean and catchy call-to-action to every social post.

15- Make Use of Brand Kits to Create a Theme

Your social media home page is like a vitrine to your brand and you don’t want to leave a bad first impression.

Luckily, using your brand kit, especially the color pallet, you already have the necessary elements to create your unique aesthetic images on social.

Let’s check how much this is important in building and increasing brand awareness.

So, you see this picture and you immediately think of…

Source: Instagram

Correct, McDonald’s! The golden arcs of potatoes, surrounded by the red pool of ketchup!

Note that “McDonald’s” is not written anywhere, and you recognize it by other elements such as colors and logo.

16- Use Social Media as a Teaching Tool

Are there important points about using your products and services that you might need to share with your audience? Then make a video about it and educate your audience.

Here’s a cool example of how “Apartment Therapy” is using Instagram to help users by posting simple home decoration tips.

Source: Instagram

17- Publish Posts Regularly to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media

This item also focuses on social media engagement. Since some platforms’ algorithms, such as Instagram, are designed to show the content to more engaging followers of that account, it’s a good idea to post regularly so that the platform knows that you have a pattern for publishing.

Not only does it depend on how frequently you publish, but also it depends on when you publish your posts.

Using your social media insights, you can tell which day or hour is the best time to post on your social media.

Pro Tip: That doesn’t mean you have to bombard your followers with content. For a news agency, it’s logical to post every hour, but for other brands, once per day might be enough.

18- Keep Records of Your Progress

As Peter Drucker once said: “What gets measured, gets managed.”

If you want to see and measure the success of your efforts in increasing brand awareness, you need to measure the changes correctly! By measuring brand awareness, you’ll have a clear idea of what method works and what’s not working.

Then you can invest more in the methods that are working best for you to make your brand even more visible.

Conclusion

Now that you know all about the strategies to increase your brand awareness on social media, it’s time to implement them.

Of course, it’s always better to use all of the methods mentioned above; however, if you think it’s too much work, you can always start with a few, master them, and then move on to others.

And one last thing, social media tools such as Mentionlytics can make your work much easier and faster. So, what are you waiting for? Give it a free try now!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/brand-awareness-social-media/