One of the most accessible ways to build brand awareness is using social media. When used properly, social media allows a brand to share its personality while connecting and providing value to its audience.
When starting a business, almost anyone will tell you that establishing a social media presence is virtually non-negotiable. This is because social media allows you to be easily visible and accessible online, connect with your audience, and build brand awareness.
While it may be common knowledge that social media is imperative for a business, how to best utilize it is a different story.
Many business owners make the mistake of believing that social media is about quantity over quality. They think if they share enough posts, they are bound to reach their audience and that those posts are sufficient.
Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case.
Not only does that method lack the strategy necessary to reach the right audience, it typically fails to demonstrate consistent messaging to those who do find the page.
In short, the method of throwing a hundred posts at the wall woefully underestimates and undervalues social media as a tool for branding.
This leads to the question, how can a business use social media to increase brand awareness?
7 Ways to Use Social to Amplify Your Brand
1. Give Your Brand a Distinctive Voice and Personality
When crafting the voice and personality of your brand, it is vital to consider the audience. Reflect on your particular audience’s essential personality traits and shared interests and craft a persona that resonates with those things.
If you have more than one audience, keep the tone flexible and more neutral.
Either way, it is essential to remain consistent with your voice
2. Write and Create Relevant and Helpful Content
Remember how we said quality was more important than quantity? This is how you nail that.
Consider your audience and your brand’s personality and use that to create content that is useful to your audience. This can include business updates, images, photos, videos, infographics, and more!
The important thing is to always share things your audience may already be seeking or is interested in. As they scroll through your pages, the audience should know what kind of content to expect from your brand.
3. Take Advantage of Amplification
Amplification, a.k.a. sharing opportunities, is a great way to spread the word about your brand in an authentic way. Vendors, suppliers, employees, and customers can all be valuable resources when it comes to building your social media accounts.
An effective way to harness the power of these groups is to implement ambassador programs or street teams to engage with and share your content. You can also go the old-fashioned route and ask these connections to share your posts.
Creating content featuring these connections and tagging them in it is a great way to get their attention as well.
A few ways to move the needle on your own are to always link your social media in email blasts, the company website, and any literature the company produces.
4. Keep Branding Consistent
Maintain consistent branding across all of your social media platforms!
Businesses should strive to have the same logo, campaign branding, links, and descriptions across all platforms. Even if you need to make changes for formatting’s sake, it should still be very similar.
5. Adapt to Different Social Media Platforms
First and foremost, not every social media platform is right for your business!
Each platform has different strengths and uses, and your business should take this into consideration before creating its accounts. These differences also don’t go away after you select the right platforms for your business.
You will see better results if you change how you share information across the different platforms. What is right for Facebook will not be right for Twitter and Instagram, and vice versa!
6. Run Digital Ads
Social media posts are a great way to inform and reach your current audience, but make no mistake, paid impressions are a necessity.
Not only will digital ads place your content in front of your existing audience, but it also has the capabilities to find people similar to them and share your content with them. This allows your newly-established brand to reach even more people.
7. Provide Exceptional Customer Service
At the end of the day, no business should leave behind good old-fashioned customer service. No amount of brand-building efforts and witty posts can overcome a negative customer experience.
Use your social media as a tool to keep the pulse on what your customers are saying, and always be sure to have someone behind the accounts that can effectively respond to complaints or questions.
With these seven tips, your business should be ready to take the world of social media and branding by storm!