Did you know that 81% of consumers say that they need to be able to trust the brand in order to purchase from them?

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Proving vital for businesses to create a positive brand presence through various online mediums, a main one being social media. Creating brand awareness on social media can prove difficult for some smaller businesses due to having lower budget capacities than other bigger brands. 

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So what exactly is brand awareness?

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“Brand awareness is the extent to which a brand is recognised by potential customers and correctly associated with its particular product or service.”

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Brand awareness is an important player in your marketing game, enabling your target audience to recognise your brand is a huge stepping stone in increasing sales and conversion in the long run.

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How can you interpret brand awareness techniques throughout social media channels?

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1.) Post regularly and remain consistent 

Posting both regularly and consistently on social media will help consumers keep your brand front of mind. 

Now we aren’t talking about posting 10x a day and spamming people's timelines, because let's face it, they’ll just hit that unfollow button. Use your existing data throughout your social channels to style your approach, looking at the best days, times and frequencies to post across each platform. 

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How often is it recommended by ‘best practice’ to post on each social media platform? 

Check out this 2021 data published from the social media scheduling tool, Sprout Social.

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2.) Make use of Hashtags and tagging relevant handles/pages

Hashtags make up an important essence of building brand awareness through social media, they are a great way to reach new audiences as well as build trust and authenticity with your existing follower base. 

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Now we could go into great detail surrounding your hashtag strategy throughout particular organic social mediums, but we can touch on that another day. Using hashtags that are relevant to your business and industry are a great way to get in with the right crowd, whether this be on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.

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Let's take a look at two examples. 

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Example 1: Reaching new audiences, CampaignHero

So, for CampaignHero if we wanted to try and expand our reach through a platform like LinkedIn, we would use an industry related hashtag that is relevant to us, e.g. #supportingsmallbusiness. 

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Example 2: Retaining and building authenticity, Dusk 

A company that uses their own branded hashtag to great level is Dusk. Their #Myduskstyle hashtag has huge success with their audience throughout Instagram in which you can explore their products and decor inspiration. 

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Also make sure you are tagging relevant profiles/pages on your posts- but only where relevant. Tagging appropriate handles in your post can widen your reach, and therefore increase awareness of your brand in the social media space. You can do this by:

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• Tagging customers in user generated content. 
• Tagging an article with the author. 
• Tagging a partner or a connection you work closely with. 

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Don’t tag a random number of profiles that have no relevance to your business or your post, the algorithm will detect you as spam and will penalise you for it.

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3.) Run giveaways and social contents 

A quick-win result that is often used by smaller brands is by running a social media giveaway. This is often done by publishing a post and getting viewers to engage by sharing or tagging a friend in the post in order to widen the reach. 

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We understand that as a small business you won’t have the money to fund a full holiday giveaway! But smaller things can be used to grab attention from an audience. Using this give-away campaign strategy throughout social obviously spreads the brand name and encourages some to check out your business. 

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Something like this… 

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4.) Increase your branded content 

Did you know that using a signature colour can increase brand recognition by 80%? 

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Ensure you are branding your content across all channels, ensure every image or video is following your brand guidelines in terms of colour, font and logos. This opens up your brand to be better recognised. 

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Haven’t yet created your brand guidelines? Get started by using our free downloadable template here.

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5.) Make use of new feature releases on different platforms 

In the last few years, social media platforms are quick off the mark to release new features to their channels for example Instagram releasing Reels, LinkedIn releasing Stories and so on. But what marketeers learnt was that typically new features that were used are favoured by the platform's algorithm therefore widening reach and increasing brand awareness simply by utilizing other tools on the social channel. 

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6.) ‘Boost’ an organic post

Applying a small budget to an organic post can also help boost brand awareness, especially if you're a local business trying to reach new people in your service area. A boosted post is also effective for reaching people that are similar to your existing audience, this can be done through Facebook, Instagram and recently, LinkedIn. 

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That’s where we round it off, six brilliant and cost-efficient ways to increase brand awareness across your social media channels which won’t take up all your time and resources.

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Looking for more inspiration? Head over to our 5 social media top tips for your small business.

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