In a thriving digital arena, talking about how to increase brand awareness through social media sounds a bit “retro.” But, many businesses, specifically the service-oriented ones, still fail to make their social copy stick. They make exhaustive social media calendar, push the content tirelessly, yet fail to receive the engagement they ought to. Strategy just fizzles out, and everyone wonders why. All that happens is they lose faith in social media’s potential.
But as your guide in the social media industry, let’s restate the well-known fact for you, social media is the best friend you can ever find if you want to build a stunning brand. After all, it has the maximum number of buyers you can ever find anywhere at a single instance.
Statista predicts that there will be 3.02 billion social media users worldwide by 2021. So how do you get your brand in front of those billions of users? How do you get the attention from those millions of potential customers trying to cut through the noise? Here’s our small guide.
There you go!
1. Find the RIGHT platform
Each social networking website has a specific set of offerings. It is a search engine in itself that people use to browse through the products and services of your niche. For example, if you are into the B2B sector, you are more likely to find your target market on LinkedIn, rather than millennial-friendly Instagram.
With the popularity of social media, it is pretty easy to assume that your target market uses one particular social media platform or another or probably each of them. Well, that’s not an ideal case.
Once you know who your target market is, figure out the best platform to work with. Search the conversations and ideas people are discussing. Build a platform for discussion as the initial stage before you even try reaching out.
2. Make it manageable
Now that you have found the perfect social platform for yourself, it’s time to draft a strategy. And the first step for the same is to understand that you don’t have to run after perfection. It’s about a plan that is sustainable in the long run. There is no use building one that fizzles out pretty soon. Back it by strong support from content marketing efforts. Go for consistently pushing the content that’s loved by your audience. Choose a few outposts and focus on building connections.
3. Get visual
Well, content talks, but visual content makes sense. Getting your content noticed in the noisy social media arena is daunting. It requires a deep study of the buyer’s mind and a compelling social copy that attracts attention. Adding visuals to content makes it all the more comfortable for the audience to connect with the brands. Once you have identified the content that you would like to publish, wrap it up into a compelling visual like image and video to attract followers.
4. Stay Native
Something that works wonderfully well on Twitter might not do that well on Facebook. Understand that it’s okay and make sure you don’t impose standards of one platform on the other. Recognize that your Facebook audience is not entirely there on Twitter, or vice-versa. As such, don’t get too carried away with automation and auto-post the same social copy across all the platforms.
Twitter may force you to post content within the character range of 280, that doesn’t happen on Facebook. Further, Hashtags are not as successful on Facebook or other platforms as they are on Instagram.
Consider the audience as being unique to any one platform, and provide content that suits the taste of the audience on each of these. After all, better engagement and better result is all we crave for.
5. Be conversational
Many businesses on social media choose broadcasting mode over other alternatives. But that’s what multiplies the failure quotient to your endeavors. Posting nothing but the outbound messages will only turn off your audience, thereby decreasing the engagement rate. The omnidirectional nature of the messages will gradually take a toll on the number of followers.
Try striking up conversations with others, shout out to them, and turn the spotlight elsewhere once in a while. Taking up this strategy will augment the engagement rate, followers, and clickthroughs.
6. Get the right mix of engagement and action
Engagement and action are both a crucial part of social media. And maintaining a balance between both is equally vital to ensure that you can leverage social profiles to full potential. Try engaging peers by posting a funny or typical post- Provoke thought and garner a positive reaction. But that’s not just the end to it.
Let the business mind take over sometimes and head over as you share the call-to-action. A post directing the audience to blog, or case studies, or portfolio (anything that takes the buyer off the social media and to your website).
The key is to make sure your customers come across each type of content now and then. Try mixing it up in different ways, and see what reaction you get from your unique audience.
7. Leverage trends
The digital world always has something for the over-curious audience. Sometimes it is the Ice Bucket Challenge, while sometimes it is Kiki Challenge. Why not leverage these trends to your benefit and get yourself some popularity from the buzz. Check what’s trending on Twitter and Facebook list and identify the familiar spot of interest. Once done, put your best content curation and creation tools to use and get going.
8. Connect with influencers
What’s social media without “social”? And for that very thing, you need that community of followers to interact with. Building one, however, from scratch is in itself a BIG task, let alone the time and efforts it takes. But take a deep breath, social media has been around for a long time now, and luckily, some have already passed through the phase. The “influencers” we call them.
Recognize those non-competing influencers and connect with them. Pave the way for content exchange (or partnership) in a way that it proves beneficial for both. Once their followers start recognizing you, they’ll land up in your list gradually, but eventually, given that you maintain the quality.
9. Track everything
All your efforts are not really worth it if you can’t measure them. Growing brand awareness only makes sense if you can measure it. While social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, etc. allow engagement statistics at fingertips, don’t overlook the value of other measurement tools.
A better view of the metrics enables you to identify what works best for you and how can you transform better into best.
Happy Social Media!!!
Building buzz around your brand might take a bit of experimenting. However, with a dedicated awareness strategy in place, you can nail it perfectly. By following the principles above, you can poise yourself towards becoming a brand that rules the minds of the target market.
Author Bio:
Apoorv Gehlot is the founder of Matellio LLC, a software engineering studio based in California, USA. Being an avid learner, he takes a keen interest in exploring various aspects of the digital realm, and ideate some of the finest solutions with his team of innovators. Apoorv believes in sharing his time-tested experience and deep-rooted knowledge with the readers across the world to enlighten the audience through concise and meaningful write-ups.
