Excuse us while we explain the obvious, but social media awareness isn’t just about knowing Facebook and Instagram exists.
Brands need to know what platforms their customers use, what their life interests are, and how to talk their language.
With this knowledge, any business can then leverage the connectivity and unique flavor of human interaction on social media to drive awareness and affinity.
This is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to promote a brand.
For anyone that is just getting started with social media marketing for brand awareness, walk with us as we explore what social media awareness is and how to leverage various platforms to grow customer numbers.
What is Social Media Awareness?
Social media awareness refers to the knowledge and practical use of social channels for marketing and promoting a brand.
There are different levels of social media awareness, but any brand using social media engages in some sort of brand awareness campaign.
Brand awareness is defined as the extent to which customers are familiar with a brand or its products.
It can also be taken to mean how recognizable or memorable a brand is among its target audience.
The use of social media to promote brand awareness allows brands to create and nurture personal connections with a particular audience.
According to Oberlo, an average of 2.5 hours is spent daily on social networks and messaging. Thus, it is clear that social media is a very important part of people’s lives.
Oberlo also reports that 73% of marketers found social media marketing “somewhat effective” or “very effective.”
As we say in marketing, we go where the people are.
More importantly, 54% of social browsers use these platforms to research products, often looking for reviews and recommendations from trusted sources.
For these and many other reasons that we will discuss in subsequent sections, every brand should consider using social media to grow awareness and promote customer engagement.
Importance of Social Media Awareness for Brands
Here are a few topics to consider.
Increase Brand Awareness
Increasing your reach and expanding your market reach is one of the most important reasons for a brand to use social media.
Even for small businesses, local communities make rich hunting grounds to gain and nurture new leads.
Because social media is highly interactive, brands can use influencer marketing, affiliate programs, and referrals on social media to grow the existing customer base.
There are also paid social media advertising campaigns that can bring extremely high returns when targeted and personalized for specific customers.
Build Relationships With Potential Customers
A Curalate survey found that 76% of American consumers purchased a product because they saw a brand’s social media post.
Another one by Edelman found that 39% of customers are only going to trust a brand if they have interacted with it on social media.
This just goes to show just how important it is to build and nurture positive relationships with customers.
In many cases, this is possible when you provide stellar customer service, reply to inquiries, and follow up on negative social media reviews.
Build Custom Audiences
Harley Davidson’s hyper-loyal social media community is one of the most loyal audiences the brand has.
Similarly, brands can build custom audiences that are easier to understand and engage with.
Custom audiences will be communities of fans (current customers) or target groups (potential customers) that brands can nurture.
One of the ways to do this is to create communities on social media where everyone can interact; these include Facebook groups, subreddits, and Instagram hashtags.
Often, these communities are self-sustaining and only require regular moderation and incentivizing to generate more interest.
Now, building these custom audiences isn’t just a numbers game. It’s more about the quality of those relationships and the ease with which your message travels inside those circles. Users feel included, even privileged, when a brand speaks directly to them in a space they’ve chosen. That sort of engagement sticks with people a lot longer than a billboard ever would. If you’re still skeptical, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence (just scroll through a few niche Facebook groups or vibrant subreddits) showing how brand advocates emerge almost organically when there’s genuine interaction.
And let’s not overlook how flexible these communities can be. Trends shift on a dime online; what’s popular this month might fade fast, replaced by some new meme or micro-interest. The good news is, these micro-communities let brands react quickly—changing tone, rolling out a campaign, or even apologizing if something doesn’t land quite right. Sometimes the best insights for future products or services actually come straight from these rolling comment threads. Listening well can be more valuable than leading the conversation.
Grow an Audience With a Small Budget
For small brands and startup businesses, a social media budget may be out of the question.
That’s okay because getting started on social media brand awareness often costs as little as $0.
Business founders and other stakeholders can start from scratch by creating official brand channels.
From then on, producing social media content such as taking pictures and videos is enough to start gaining traction.
Another often overlooked but highly effective method of gaining and growing an audience is to get friends, employees, and other stakeholders to talk about the brand on their own channels.
This gets the brand before a much bigger audience and gains more trust.
Gain Market Insights and Learn About Your Competitors
Social media is a goldmine of genuine customer feedback.
By talking directly to customers collecting direct feedback, brands can gauge how their products or services are received in the market.
For better market insights, marketing teams can also invest in social listening tools that sift through social channels for comments, posts, mentions, and other activities.
These tools then build comprehensive reports that can inform business managers how customers are reacting to their brand, its products, and services.
The same can also be done for competing brands, allowing marketers to discover gaps in the market where they can push their products.
Stay Top-Of-Mind With the People Who Matter, Build Loyalty
Most markets have cut-throat competition, and brands that aren’t constantly interacting with their customers are going to get forgotten.
Creating regular social and interesting social media content keeps a brand relevant among the people who matter most.
Additionally, it also improves brand loyalty, with millennials found to be 62% more loyal to brands that engage directly with them on social media.
Promote Products and Services
When a brand already has established channels and communities on social media, it becomes the perfect place to launch new products and promote existing ones.
Hashtags, Instagram Stories, and other tools typically generate a lot of interest when done right.
Brands and their marketing teams should generate buzz and even push targeted ads to promote particular products to particular customer bases on social media.
As we have seen, these efforts are likely to produce a high ROI. Other creative ways to promote products on social channels includes:
- Running contests with giveaways.
- Having rewards and gifts for referrals.
- Creating highly engaging stories that stand out. These stories can then lead to landing pages for customers to buy a product.
Get To Tell Your Story
People are suckers for unique, memorable stories.
Whether it’s a story about what inspired a business, how a product touched a life in a unique way, or interesting insights into the lives of founders or employees, social media platforms are the perfect place to tell these stories.
Powerful stories are their own movement.
For example, brands that talk about how they are championing climate change, going green, or using vegan ingredients will gain much more loyal customers because of this shared identity.
Social Media for SEO
Social media has immense SEO value because it helps drive website traffic and create backlinks.
According to Text Request, brands that create just 15 posts per month get, on average, 1,200 new leads every month.
Thus, a vibrant social media strategy also drives traffic and visibility for other marketing channels.
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