Mark Crompton: 10 tips for building better brand awareness through Social Media
If you’re looking to make an impact with your brand fast, start with social media.
Gone are the days when a half decent website was the lynchpin of online success. Social is always on and always now. Great content and compelling storytelling will consistently drive engagement and awareness of your brand, so how do you do it?
Here are my top 10 tips to get you started
1. Use the right channel for your audience
Keep your social network profiles complete and up to date. If your working B2B, focus on LinkedIn and Twitter, B2C then YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are the best places to start. Many consumers won’t visit your website everyday but they will engage on social media, this is where you should communicate your most important messages.
2. Metrics and Analytics
Identify the usage patterns of your target audiences so you can focus on the channels they use most. Aggregate all your social analytics together using a platform like Hootsuite or Socialbakers. On a side note Socialbakers offer free social media statistics so you can get an idea of the type of content your audience is engaging with before you’ve even written your first post.
3. SEO
Use plenty of relevant keywords in your content, descriptors and tags. SEO is a murky world with lots of companies promising to sell you snake oil to increase your google rankings. For social, keep it simple. Relevant keywords for your brand need to appear a few times throughout the body text. But if it sounds clumsy, you’ve overdone it.
4. Imagery
A picture paints a thousand words, your social post lives for about three seconds and perhaps closer to zero if you’re imagery is vague or boring. Make sure to include relevant images and links in your posts and be sure to optimise based on the social channel. Don’t have your own imagery? Use Unsplash and get access to thousands of free images.
5. Engage with your audience
Take the time to respond if someone has commented or engaged with your post. It will improve the post ranking in social feeds and it will drive further engagement in the future.
6. Get feedback
Ask for audience feedback often. Post open-ended questions on blog articles and social posts, you could even incorporate social polls on your website.
7. Third party content
By sharing user-generated and third-party content you’ll highlight your digital community and encourage them to be a part of your brand story.
8. Capitalise on hashtags
Include relevant hashtags so your audience can follow the conversation and participate. Consider how you might capitalise on your owned hashtags as well as trending hashtags to engage new audiences.
9. Use personality
On social, people appreciate a natural, non-corporate tone. If you’re following corporate social media accounts it’s probably because they have a bit of personality and aren’t just brand robots pushing out content. Showing the value of your product or service to your audience is important, but keeping it human is perhaps more important.
10. Tell a story
Most importantly use an overarching narrative or story to weave connections between your posts.
The greatest challenge and opportunity within social today is rising above the noise to engage the right audiences with relevant content.
Ultimately if you have a good story, people will listen.
