Building brand awareness is important for any business, especially through social media platforms.
Let’s face it, building brand awareness is difficult. Small businesses usually rely on word of mouth, advertising, and social media to build it. In this post, we’ll go over proven strategies that can make social media marketing easier for your small business. The strategies below will ensure that you can effectively build up your brand by making use of your various social media accounts.
How to build brand awareness
Tailor your message based on the platform
When it comes to social media marketing, you’ll want to make sure your content is tailored to the social media platforms you use. For example, posts that work on Twitter aren’t necessarily good for Facebook and vice versa. There are pros and cons to cross-posting. A lot of small businesses make the mistake of automatically posting the same exact content from one account to the next. This is understandable since it saves a lot of time and energy, which can be spent elsewhere. However, engagement varies between each platform and cross-posting is usually viewed as being lazy.
You should cater to the strengths of each platform. For example, Twitter lets you use short, trendy messages and hashtags to draw attention to your posts. On the other hand, Facebook lets you write out longer messages. Their platform is also a better place to post things like pictures and infographics, which aren’t as popular on Twitter.
Act like a normal human on social media
So, what does it mean to act human? For starters, don’t try to sell your products and services in every post. For the most part, focus on creating interesting, funny, informational, and/or motivational content. A good example of this is the Planet Fitness Instagram account. They share motivational photos of people working out and photos with funny workout-related captions. This sort of content doesn’t sell anything directly, however, it does build brand awareness. It also leads to people sharing their content. When people like, share, or comment on one of their posts, Planet Fitness gets exposed to more people.
The purpose of a business’s social media account is to market to potential customers. Although, that doesn’t mean every post you create has to be a carefully read press release. People on social media value when businesses act as if they’re run by actual humans rather than robots.
The fast food restaurant, Taco Bell, has a Twitter account which is a perfect example of a how a company can sound like a normal person. Even when Taco Bell replies to its users on Twitter, the company often uses GIFs and emojis, just like their demographic uses in normal conversations.
Speaking of which, make sure you interact with people on social media. Try responding to their questions and comments with personalized answers. A restaurant owner may try responding to people with recommended dishes or a computer repairman may answer technical questions, which could lead to someone hiring him. When you are replying to comments and posting on social media, make sure you have a consistent tone of voice for your brand.
Decide which social media platforms you’ll use
There are a bunch of different social media platforms out there and they each have their own purpose. So, you might be wondering to yourself “which platforms do I need to be on?” Social media marketing can take quite a bit of time, and being active on each platform won’t necessarily benefit your business. With that being said, you’ll need to choose certain platforms.
Once you identify who your target audience is, research the social media platforms that they’re most active on. For us, our demographic is mostly on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However your demographic could primarily be on Snapchat and Instagram if you’re marketing to people 16-24 years old.
Create effective content
Another important aspect of social media marketing for a small business is to create effective content. Now, what do we mean when we say effective content? In the case of social media, effective content refers to content that people want to share with their friends and followers. Getting your content shared on social media is one of the easiest ways to increase your brand’s awareness; especially if the person sharing your content has a huge audience or a lot of friends.
Pictures, infographics, and videos are often shared the most on social media since people tend to engage with that type of content more than text-only posts. However, sharing blog posts that provide value can get you likes and shares. If your business isn’t blogging, you should definitely do so as there are many benefits.
If you’re struggling to get traction with your content, you can always do a giveaway or run a special deal in order to increase engagement. Depending on how you market it, you can drastically increase your brand awareness by doing something like a giveaway or special offer.
Some investment may be required
When building brand awareness through social media, sure, plenty of marketing can be done without spending a dime, however you might want to spend money. If you’re struggling to make an impact, consider investing some money in running ad campaigns. All of the major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest) will allow you to run advertisements. If you decide to run ads, setup a social media advertising strategy first.
You can also pay for followers, likes, and shares, though we strongly don’t recommend that you do this. It’s always better to get followers, likes, and shares the natural way by creating good, original content that people want to engage with. Building brand awareness through social media will take time, and possibly money, but it will be well worth the investment.
Let us know which social media platforms your business actively uses in the comment section below.
