How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media

As a marketer, you are always looking for ways to boost trust and recognition of your brand and what you stand for. With billions of daily users spread across a number of networks, social media offers a great platform to do just that. However, even with this realization, there remains one question. What should you keep in mind when thinking about how to build a brand through social media?
If you are interested in increasing brand awareness through social media, the first thing you need to do is to understand that brand building can take real time and effort. What is possibly more important is that you have a strategy behind your efforts that allows you to build and grow your brand in a targeted way. A strategy involves more than just posting content about your brand hoping that people will start following you and recognizing your brand. Rather, brand building on social media involves utilizing insights that come from data-based analyses as well as correctly applying other best practices.
In this article, we will go through the steps related to how to build and grow your brand on social media and the important best practices you should keep in mind. Most of all, we want to give you a good overview of what it takes to build a brand through social media and what tools you should consider using to help you.
What is the Role of Social Media in Brand Building
We should start off by talking about how social media can impact your overall brand marketing strategy. Social media is one of many different channels that your business can consider when it comes to growing your brand. Keep in mind that brand building is first and foremost about increasing brand recognition. The more people that know your brand and have a positive impression of it in terms of the product and/or services that you offer, the better. The challenge is finding the best avenues to reach new people who might not have heard of your brand or who don’t know what you actually offer. In the search for various marketing and communication channels to use, social media marketing has become one of the most important ways to reach these people. However, it probably makes the most sense to make social media one of multiple channels you are using to reach your target audience.
On social media, brand awareness can be greatly enhanced because of the sheer reach that social media offers and the options you have for communicating with your audience. For one, there are many different content formats you can use to communicate with potential customers or those who may be interested in what you are offering. Second, social media offers a great opportunity to not only have people view your content, but also actively engage with it.
There are many different stylistic options you have for building and growing your brand through social media channels. Moreover, we have all seen many example of businesses using social media channels successfully to boost their reach and get people excited about what they are offering. All of this sounds good, but actually pulling it off is a different matter. That is why we want to discuss some best practices you can follow that can help you grow your brand using social media.
How to Build and Grow a Brand on Social Media: 7 Best Practices to Follow
Increasing your brand awareness on social media normally requires a well-thought-out process that not only follows general best practices, but is also tailored to your company or brand’s overall marketing plan. In order to create a brand building process, you need to understand how to effectively use best practices for your own business and the industry in which you operate. This can present challenges if you don’t have an in-depth understanding of how to build a brand through social media.
For this reason, we have decided to compile a list of best practices that goes beyond the basics of brand building. This means that we are not just giving you a general suggestion to follow, but explaining in more depth what it is that you should actually do to help build your brand on social media. Our list of 7 ways to build your brand on social media includes:
- Create a Social Media Brand Strategy
- Increase Reach and Engagement Through Analytic Insights
- Run Social Media Ads
- Think Beyond the Post and Concentrate on Community Management
- Measure Brand Awareness Through Social Media
- Research Trends
- Use Social Media Monitoring

1. Create a Social Media Brand Strategy
The first step in understanding how to brand your business on social media is to create a well-thought-out strategy. This strategy involves more than just creating a posting or a content plan, but rather encompasses all aspects of social media management. A brand awareness strategy for social media should revolve around 3 different areas that we will explain in more detail as we go: analytics, posting/planning, and community management.
Each one of these areas should have its own detailed plan of exactly what tasks are involved, who is doing those tasks, and how each one relates to one other. For instance, your social media analytics insights should help you create your posting plan. Your community management plan should also take into account when and what you are posting and work toward help in increasing the reach and engagement of your posts. Lastly, when researching how to grow a brand on social media, make sure that you also have clear goals in mind in terms of KPIs. Your strategy can only be accurately assessed if you know what you are aiming for.
2. Increase Reach and Engagement Through Analytic Insights
Successful posts are all about the content, right? While creating amazing content is certainly key to helping you increase reach and engagement on social media, there are many things you can research to help you increase reach and engagement, which is a key part of growing your brand. In fact, building your brand on social media can be helped by utilizing data-based analytical insights. You should know that there are different areas that you should focus on in this regard.
The first is content optimization. This is important for any project that seeks to grow brand awareness, since analyzing data can give you helpful insights related to various aspects of content creation. For instance, researching the best times to post and top-performing hashtags can help raise your engagement and reach. Moreover, you can get a better idea of what content formats help generate the most post interactions or what type of content your audience wants to see. These are helpful insights to have when actually creating your content.
Competitor analysis is another area that is related to content optimization and gaining overall insights and tips in the social media world. You may have seen some of your competitors have success building their own brands, and you want to find out what they are doing right. Competitor analysis helps you take a deep look at their social media performance and gives you various insights that you can then apply to your own content strategy.
A powerful social media analytics tool is crucial for giving you the types of helpful insights you ended in this case. If you really want to take advantage of advance social media analytics, it generally helps to look for a tool that offers unlimited profile analysis, since this allows you to analyze hundreds or thousands of similar profiles to your own. This gives you large data sets to analyze that can help you more accurately spot trends and give you content optimization insights.
3. Run Social Media Ads
If you are using social media marketing to increase brand awareness, then you have probably tried a variety of Ads. This is because Ads can be a great way to boost reach. This is especially true if you are just getting started out on your social media brand awareness activities and want to accelerate the entire process. However, simply running Ads is not enough and requires some thought. First, you need to find out who your target audience is and your overall messaging. Second, and related to the previous section, you need to make sure that your content resonates with your audience, and it is best to make sure you are benefiting from content optimization insights.
As we already mentioned before, when thinking about how to simply increase brand engagement on social media, be sure that your goals are clearly defined. Your return on investment for Ads should be something you pay close attention to since, if your Ads are not performing, this can cost you real money. When running Ads, make sure that you are tracking specific metrics such as follower growth and reach in order to see how they are performing. Also, your Ad strategy should compliment your overall content strategy and seek to enhance content that is already doing well, not simply boosting content that is not successful to begin with.
4. Think Beyond the Post and Concentrate on Community Management
One of the keys to understanding how to create brand awareness on social media is to not focus only on what you post. Creating awareness goes beyond just posting content that catches the user’s attention and helps them associate with your brand in a positive way. Any social media manager would tell you how important community management is not only in helping show that you care about your followers, but also because it can help increase awareness of your brand.
Because social media community management involves so many different tasks, it is helpful to use a specialized community management tools that help your team work better together and more effectively. There are 3 main areas for why finding the right media community management tool is so important.
First, you most likely will be managing multiple social media profiles across different networks. This can mean that, on a daily basis, you need to hundreds reply to messages and comments on several different networks. Community management tools centralize all this work, allowing you and your team to effectively manage all these profiles much easier.
Second, task organization is important if you have multiple team members engaging with, and building a community. This is especially true when you have different community managers and customer service agents needing access to your profiles. For this reason, you should generally look for a community management tool that gives you project management features and ways to organize active conversations among your team members.
Third, community management tools can help in increasing the speed and efficiency in replying to messages and comments, as well as other tasks. AI integrations within a community management tool can help you create responses faster than writing everything yourself. This, in addition to being able to make and use of pre-written templates, can help you quickly generate replies to messages and comments. You should also look for various automation features that allow you to do things such as liking posts automatically instead of doing it manually.

5. Measure Brand Awareness Through Social Media
You may be undertaking a number of the optimization tips above, but how do you know if they are working? Are you making progress? And how fast are your competitors improving? These are all important questions whenever you are undertaking a brand building campaign. Most of all, understanding how you are performing and whether or not your progress is comparable or better than your competitors is important.
KPI tracking and benchmarking can help in goal setting and give you an idea if your optimization activities or Ads are performing the way you want. Benchmarking in particular has important uses for brand building on social media. The first is that benchmarking helps you set realistic goals since, if your tool allows you to track an unlimited number of competitors, you can bring in more data points, giving you a more accurate calculation of averages across metrics. The second is that this can also help you benchmark yourself against the performance of your competitors over time to see where you might be doing well, and where you may be falling behind.
6. Research Trends
Brand awareness through social media can be enhanced through addressing topics that interest people. The desire to spot trending topics on social media as they are developing is not a new idea for social media managers. However, it is sometimes difficult to detect trending topics in real time. That is why specialized research tools that help you find trending are important if you are trying to stay ahead of what’s popular.
If you are looking for a more detailed look at overall trends in your industry or field as they relate to hashtags, keywords, sentiment, posting times, etc., then having a social media research tool is important. Similar to having strong analytics capabilities, social media research can help you stay ahead of any trend. The key is that your tool offers you various filtering options that allow you to search according to industry keywords, language, and/or country as well as specifying the timeframe you are interested in.
7. Use Social Media Monitoring
Brand building should always involve some sort brand protection, and social media monitoring can help in this regard. This because social media monitoring can help you more effectively monitor comments about your brand and help you identify what people think about it. This goes beyond community management since social media monitory involves detecting mentions of your brand away from your profiles.
We should also mention that monitoring should not be focused just on social media. Rather, when talking about brand building, you should find a tool that analyzes both social media networks and on various websites. Moreover, having analytics insights as part of a social media tool can make it even more useful if you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of mentions of your brand on a daily basis. After all, the ability to see where mentions are coming from, the sentiment associated with them, and their reach can be valuable.

How to Build, and Grow, a Brand Through Social Media
When creating a social media brand awareness strategy, you should be sure to first have a good understanding of your overall goals and the different areas of social media management that you need to pay attention to. Our tips and best practices above were geared to help you build and grow your brand through the use of a comprehensive strategy that touches on all areas of social media management.
If you are looking to increase your brand awareness through social media, you should consider trying out Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial. This “all-in-one” social media tool gives its users powerful analytics, publishing, community management, monitoring, and research features. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature is that it offers unlimited profile management and analysis. This means you can track, analyze, and manage all the profiles that you want, whether it is hundreds or thousands of profiles.
Fanpage Karma also offers a free weekly webinar where you can find out more about the tool.