How to Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media
The brand is a company’s most important and valuable asset. Though many people think that the brand is just a company’s name and logo, the brand represents a lot more than that. It includes reputation, impressions, customer opinions, and much more. The symbiosis of these and a couple of other factors is what sets your company from the competition.
Nowadays, more than half of the world’s population uses social media. People use social networks as part of their daily lives, so reaching out to people on social media is very important if you’re looking to increase your brand’s influence.
But developing a social media marketing strategy isn’t enough to make your brand popular. You have to monitor how users react to it and use the findings to improve your marketing and influence.
Every successful company needs to understand why and how to measure brand awareness on social media. If you need a little help with that, our detailed guide on social media brand awareness will reveal many useful tips and tricks to help your company grow.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a general indicator of how familiar or aware potential consumers are with your brand and its products. With simple words, brand awareness measures how memorable and recognizable your brand is to its target audience.
Establishing brand awareness is an excellent marketing strategy that can help you reach better awareness and popularization among consumers. It is the heart of marketing strategies, as brand awareness builds trust and increases sales.
Therefore, brand awareness can be described as a synergy of brand recall and brand recognition. It measures how quickly customers remember your brand and how easily they can differentiate it from other brands.
With social media as an inevitable part of our everyday lives, it is one of the most powerful tools to build and enhance brand awareness, increasing sales revenue.
Why Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media?
Business people are often preoccupied with sales and ROI, overlooking the importance of brand awareness. Even though it may come off as quite an abstract concept, brand awareness plays a vital role in the profit equation. Take Coca Cola for instance – the company spends billions on advertising. We’re not saying you should match Coca-Cola’s marketing investments, but you should give its brand awareness the attention.
Measuring brand awareness on social media is one of the easiest ways to see how well you’ve established your brand online. There are a couple of quantifiable metrics that can help you do that. Different metrics will reveal various aspects of your brand’s online reputation and help you improve your marketing and sales strategies.
Find your target audience
Through brand awareness metrics, you’ll be able to find out which social media platforms fit your niche, help you find your target audience, and which social media sites you should put most of your focus on. That way, you won’t spread across different sites that aren’t worth your energy, time, or money. Related: How to Grow Your Brand on Social Media
Verify the efficiency of your campaigns
Measuring brand awareness is an excellent way to check out whether your campaign is giving the desired results. Brand awareness measures will help you realize whether you’re getting the customers you’ve expected and if the current strategy is proving to be effective or not.
Reassess your goals
Social media metrics can also reveal whether your initial goals are on point. Perhaps you’re not getting the desired results because your entire campaign is going in the wrong direction. If that’s the case, you might have to reestablish your goals and start an entirely new marketing strategy. Social media metrics and brand awareness will help you reach your goals.
How to Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media
Measuring brand awareness on social media is vital but not very straightforward, especially if you have no prior experience with social media marketing. That’s why we have a couple of tactics to help you measure brand awareness easily.
Check up on your social media followers
Social media followers may seem like a vanity metric that won’t help you understand your performance. Still, generally speaking, your fan base can give you a pretty good assessment of how broad your reach is.
Though it doesn’t always have to be the case, most people following your brand are interested in it and like it. Therefore, your followers can give you a good idea about your brand awareness. There’s always some confused user that’s not entirely familiar with what your company is and does, but such users shouldn’t account for too much of your existing fan base.
Your followers are the people who are most likely to see your content. See how many people are looking at your content, and try to use metrics to help you optimize your posts to increase brand awareness.
Conduct a brand awareness survey
One of the best and simplest ways to measure brand awareness is to launch a short survey. Select your target audience – the people you want to be aware of your brand, and ask what they think about your brand freely.
For more accurate results, select a broader audience. Don’t limit the respondents to your existing customers – try to include potential customers to see what they think about your brand.
When creating the survey, make sure you have your priorities in order. Set the goal you want to tackle and steer the questionnaire in that direction. Set up a specific question as your guideline, and make sure that you design the survey so that it will give you a precise answer.
Try Google Trends
Google Trends is a powerful analysis tool that can make your life a lot easier. With Google’s resources, Google Trend scans the internet for any mentions of your brand. If you regularly turn to Google Trends, you’ll be able to see whether you’re getting new mentions and whether they’re positive or not. But Google Trends isn’t limited to checking up on your brand. You can also see how much your competitors are present on the internet and compare performance and likability.
Google Trends data can be very helpful. However, there’s a significant downside to using the tool – if your brand has a generic name or title that’s already associated with something else, reading the data will be particularly harder.
Use tracking software
Suppose you’re looking for a simple and long-term solution to measuring brand awareness on social media. In that case, there are many outstanding software solutions ready to do the heavy lifting for you. Brand tracking software is an app that will help you measure your brand’s health. It allows you to run quarterly or monthly brand tracking surveys and immediately get all the data you need.
Brand tracking software will help you measure brand awareness and assist you with a number of other tasks, like measuring brand sentiment, net promoter scores, etc.
Search volume in Google Analytics
If you noticed your website traffic starting to go up, it is now an excellent time to look deeply into those insights. Google Analytics will help you measure an important brand awareness metric – branded search volume. By looking at branded search volume, you’ll be able to understand how users find their way to your brand. You’ll get to see which keywords they use and use the information to your advantage.
If your brand’s name frequently pops up in the list of keywords, people know your brand, know what you’re doing, and see you as a good option for what they’re looking for.
Track social engagement
Your followers on social media aren’t the only indicator of brand awareness. Engagement through likes, comments, retweets, and other actions is another indicator that can help you determine brand awareness and popularity. The engagement factor highlights how many people are aware of your brand’s existence and, most of all, how many people value and agree with your content. Social engagement will help you understand how much impact your brand has on its customers. Must Read: How to Increase Social Media Engagement Organically
Monitoring Social Media Metrics
If you’re ready to dig deeper into brand awareness on social media, you’ll have to understand social media metrics. Once you know the meaning of different metrics and learn how to interpret their meaning, you’ll be able to determine which one you should monitor.
Therefore, here are a couple of the most important social media metrics you should be monitoring:
Audience growth rate
One of the key metrics measuring how fast your brand grows on social media is the audience growth rate. As the name already suggests, it displays how quickly you gain new followers. How many new followers you’ve gained is very important, but what’s most important is how fast you’ve gained those customers.
To track your audience growth rate, you’ll need to divide the number of new followers by your total audience and multiply the result by 100. You can do the same math for your competitors and see how well your brand performs in comparison.
Post reach
Post reach is a social media metric that states how many people have seen your post. It is one of the easiest to track and understand. Post reach is affected by two important aspects: timing and content. By understanding post reach, you’ll be able to see when your audience is most active and schedule your posts for optimal views. The content part of the story will tell you what your audience finds valuable.
To calculate the post reach rate, you’ll need to measure the post reach of a specific post by the number of total followers, Multiply the number by 100, and get the post reach percentage.
Potential reach
Potential reach measures how many people could see a post during a reporting period. It isn’t limited to your followers. It also accounts for the number of people who could have seen the post if some of your followers shared your post with their network of followers.
Understanding potential reach is very important, as it allows you to work on extending your audience, which should be your final goal.
To calculate potential reach, you’ll need to multiply the total number of mentions by the followers who’ve mentioned you. That way, you’ll get your theoretical reach, and your potential reach is 2% to 5% of it. Related: 8 Tips For Maximizing Social Media For Business Purposes
Social share of voice
Social share of voice or SSoV measures how many times people mention your brand. It includes both direct and indirect mentions, so whether they tag the brand or not, the mention is added to your social share of voice. SSoV will help you understand how visible and how relevant your brand is in the market.
To get the SSoV, you’ll need to divide your brand’s mentions by the total number of mentions (including your and competitor brands). Multiply the result by 100, and you’ll get the SSoV percentage.
Impressions
The first of the two social media metrics counting views is impressions. Impressions measure how many times social media browsers display your content. They don’t filter out the people who didn’t click on your content but only state how many times people were exposed or introduced to it.
Impressions don’t filter out repeat views. If a single user viewed your content a couple of times, each view counts, even when coming from the same viewer. Repeat views are very important, as they can help you learn which content your audience likes best.
Applause rate
Applause rate is an engagement metric that’s very important for brand awareness. It shows the number of approval actions, such as your posts’ likes and favorites. When your followers like or mark your posts as favorites, they acknowledge that the content is valuable to them. Finding out which posts are most valuable and how much your audience values your content can be an excellent guideline to help you move forward.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is one of the most important conversion metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of social engagement and brand awareness. It measures the number of visitors who took some action on your page, whether it is subscribing to your newsletter, downloading some content, registering for an event, or making an order.
A high conversion rate states that your posts are relevant, valuable, and compelling and that they kept their promise to the audience.
To calculate conversion rates on your posts, you’ll have to divide the number of conversions by the number of total clicks. Multiply the number by 100, and you’ll get the conversion rate percentage for the specific post.
Reviews and customer satisfaction
Though not a conventional metric, online reviews are perhaps the most important elements that account for brand reputation. Customer satisfaction can make or break a brand. User reviews and comments are the first things people look for when approaching a new product.
Therefore, user reviews and satisfaction can also reveal a lot about brand awareness. If you’re interested, you can look up your brand on a couple of reviewing platforms and see what people have to say. See what people like about your brand, and use it to your advantage. If you encounter any negative reviews, make sure you work on improving and eliminating the negative experiences.
Why Is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is vital when launching new products and services. It is one of the most critical factors that help consumers decide when faced with a couple of different brands to choose from. It stimulates repeat purchases, incrementing sales.
Trust
Brand awareness increases the trust in your brand. Building trust in a brand is very important for a customer to decide to make a purchase. When customers trust your brand, they build a special connection with it, increasing the chances of becoming repeat purchasers.
Brand awareness is the seal between brand trust and customer loyalty. It adds weight and personality to your brand, helping customers feel more familiar and comfortable with it.
Association
Establishing high brand awareness will ultimately lead to your brand’s name replacing common words. Take Google, for instance. Nobody says, “I’ll run an internet search on the topic” – people now say they’ll “google” the topic, and that’s precisely what brand awareness can do for you.
Brand awareness makes people associate the brand with the product. The more influence your brand has, the more likely it is to become the first choice among a broad range of options from the same category.
Brand equity
Brand awareness contributes toward a better customer experience. Customer experiences add to the value of your brand, contributing to a positive perception.
After people start to recognize your brand and purchase from you, they’ll favor the brand the most. The connection establishes trust and makes for a strong bond between the brand and its customer. With positive experiences, your brand starts to build equity, meaning higher stock price, enormous social impact, and expansion.
How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media
Now that you’ve learned why brand awareness is so important and how to measure brand awareness on social media, it is time you take action and start working on increasing brand awareness for your company on social media networks.
With the internet and social media offering endless possibilities, there are many ways for you to increase brand awareness online. However, if you’re looking for the fastest results, here are a couple of key tactics that’ll help you yield almost instant results.
Increase your social media presence
Being on social media and interacting with your target audience is one of the key steps toward better brand awareness. Social media allows you to market your company and reach a target audience that you couldn’t have contacted otherwise in just a couple of clicks.
The first thing to do is get to know your audience better. Find out which social media network is most popular among your target audience, and build a strong brand presence and potential customers. With the right platform, you’ll be able to notice significant growth in no time.
Use the social media metrics we’ve mentioned earlier to organize and schedule your posts so that they reach a broader audience. Make sure you’re always present with related content, but try to add something unique and informative as well to make it look like marketing isn’t your only goal. Read More: Why Small Businesses Need Social Media
Use referral programs
The best way for a customer to gain trust in your company is through the recommendation of their friends and family. And the best way to stimulate your customers to recommend your brand is by offering exciting referral deals, discounts, and gifts. With a well-planned referral program, you’ll successfully expand your reach and brand awareness as well.
Sponsor events
Sponsoring events is another excellent way to reach your target audience. But don’t rush into sponsoring the first event that comes your way. Make sure you understand your target audience and see which events they’re most likely to enjoy and participate in. Festivals, concerts, sports games, etc., are an excellent way to reach your target audience and introduce your brand to thousands of people.
Sponsoring an event will get your name everywhere in the event. People will start to associate it with the event, making it more memorable and popular.
Sponsor celebrities and influencers
In addition to sponsoring events, another great way to get to your target audience is by sponsoring influencers. Influencers have large fan bases, and if you find which influencers are followed by your potential customers, you can get incredible results.
For instance, if you’re selling an energy drink, you should look for an extreme sports athlete to promote the beverage. Red Bull and Monster continuously compete over which athletes to market their drinks.
Start a podcast
A podcast is an interesting and fun way to get your target audience interested in your brand. You can inform and educate potential customers about your brand, its vision, and products or services through the podcast. If you add entertainment to the podcast, you may establish an even better bond that’ll make your audience like and trust the brand.
If you’re already collaborating with celebrities or influencers, you can invite them to the podcast and let them have their say to the audience.
