How to Use Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Brand Awareness and Engagement

As of March 2023, there are 4.9 billion social media users worldwide. This is an exciting prospect for anyone who runs a business brand.

Why are more business entrepreneurs not latching up to social media marketing as an avenue to raise the profile of their business and grow brand awareness through organic engagement?

If you fall into this category or have a social media marketing strategy, you have not maximized its potential; this article is for you.

Benefits of Using Social Media Marketing to Build Brand Awareness

First, it’s important to answer why you should consider using social media marketing to elevate your brand profile online.

a. Cost-Effectiveness

Most social media networks are free, not paid. And even though some mainstream platforms are now introducing verified paid tiers, such as Twitter and Facebook, the free tier still gets you far enough.

More so, social media advertising is quite cheap, especially with the pay-per-click method used by popular platforms, including Meta, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

In essence, you can market your brand effectively on social media by paying next to nothing, unlike setting up a website, where you have to pay for domain, hosting, etc.

b. Content Ideas

If you ever run out of content ideas, check what’s happening on social media.

The endless stream of conversations on social media generates endless content ideas for reaching your audience, especially via hashtags, mentions, and current affairs.

More so, by building your content marketing strategy around the hottest topics in your niche on social media, you have a better means of reaching your audience because you would be speaking directly to their concerns and interests.

c. Media Strategy

Social media, more than any other method, offers the best chance of integrating audio-visual media content into your posts or even forming your content strategy entirely around audio-visual media.

It is often said that human beings retain information better via visual rather than verbal means. So, this is a great way to engage your audience. 

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc., are exclusively dedicated to visual media content (images and videos), while Clubhouse, Anchor, Twitter Spaces, etc., focus on live audio content.

Practical Methods of Boosting Brand Awareness through Social Media

Highlighted here are all the practical methods of applying a social media marketing strategy to grow your brand awareness.

1. Create Engaging Content: the purpose of social media is to encourage interactions and engagement. Therefore, if people are not engaging with your post, you are doing something wrong. Boost your brand awareness by creating content that grabs the audience’s attention and encourages engagement.
2. Influencer marketing: on social media, certain people become influencers who hold sway over public opinion among their followers, whether on a micro or macro scale. Partnering with influencers relevant to your brand and hiring them for ads or as brand ambassadors helps you attract the attention of more users than your brand account can normally reach.
3. Converse with followers: many brands use social media to post information and go. That’s fine, but if you are building brand awareness, that’s probably the worst use of social media. Instead, interact with your followers directly on the timeline, personalize messages, and post content encouraging them to interact.
4. Respond to feedback: for many people, social media is a means of dropping reviews and feedback about products, services, and brands they have used, whether positive or negative. Identify instances of such feedback by searching your brand mentions, then respond professionally. In all, try to build a solid relationship with users.
5. Be fun: it’s important to be professional at all times. However, the informal nature of social media interactions means that you must let that guard of professionalism down more often than elsewhere. This does not mean you should go out and post inappropriate content. Instead, it means you should always avoid having a cold, serious outlook.
6. Optimize your profile: your account profile is the first thing anyone sees once they click on your social media account. Use the same brand name on all your social media platforms for instant recognition. Also, formulate your bio so that anyone who visits will instantly discover why they should stick around.
7. Organize contests and giveaways: human love freebies. You can tap into this by strategically organizing contests and sharing giveaways to boost your brand awareness. And giveaways don’t have to be money. For instance, it could be a free ebook where users have to join the email list to download it. Above all, ensure that you are sharing value.
8. Have a consistent brand theme and message: it’s important to establish what your brand is all about before starting. How would you communicate in words? How would you represent your brand through graphics? It’s important to ensure that you are consistent. This will reduce the risk of slip-ups happening.
9. Use hashtags: always feature relevant hashtags in your posts. Hashtags boost discoverability across all social media platforms. But be strategic about it. Don’t slap the trending hashtags on your post without confirming their relevance to your brand and post. There are some hashtags you don’t want to be associated with.
10. Use images and videos: attaching visual content is a great way to maximize your awareness, even on platforms that are not primarily visual. Across all social media networks, posts with images or videos have better engagement than the ones without.
11. Build a community: this is another great way to strengthen the interactivity of your content. Organize activities that your followers can participate in. Or you can even have a fun nickname for your followers to engender that communal spirit that all humans share.
12. Use sponsored ads: organic marketing is good and perfectly okay, but you will severely limit your chances if that is all you rely on. Sponsored ads help you scale your reach exponentially. More so, social media PPC ads are very cheap and flexible so you can adjust them according to your budget, regardless of the amount.
13. Be consistent: you can build a successful blog by posting articles once a week or once a month. However, doing that on social media is a recipe for failure.
14. Collaborate with brands: by collaborating with brands with which you share values, you can benefit from the multiplier effect of the follower base of both your brands. These could be brands in your niche but who are not necessarily competitors. For instance, a sporting goods brand could collaborate with a fitness brand. If you want to find competitors to avoid or apply their strategy, the Eye10 Competitor Research tool is handy.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is an avenue that you should not ignore in promoting your brand and engaging your audience. More so, you must take a strategic approach to ensure that it is comprehensive and delivers the desired benefits.

Also, the fact that the subject is social media marketing does not mean SEO tools cannot be useful. Eye10 SEO tools have excelled in this area, such as planning keywords for your marketing strategy and researching competitors. Start doing the same today by purchasing a single subscription to access all SEO tools from Eye10.