How brands can stand out on social media

Building brand awareness is largely about reach — the more people who see your messages, the better. With the number ofreach metrics available, you can establish sub-goals and measure your progress against those goals at regular intervals.

Additional data points

Activity metrics indicate how often your company publishes new messages or engages in conversations on social channels. Generally, the more active you are on social media, the more people see your brand. Remember, consistency is key. Time decay is a factor in social media algorithms, so you don’t ever want to go completely silent. Do your best to balance quality content with quantity — examine your own social performance to determine when you should post original content and how often you should share others content.

Engagement metrics measure interactions, such as Likes or Favorites, which are also helpful in tracking whether people are truly seeing and connecting with your content, or if they are just scrolling past. Also, when a user interacts with you on social networks, your content is often seen by members of that person’s network, boosting your reach even further.

Even corporate social accounts should sound like real people communicating with customers and fans, not boardroom-approved press releases talking at people. Social is especially well suited to show the human faces of a brand — including the human narratives that drove the company’s founding, its mission, or its history — because the medium is the perfect place to establish authenticity, transparency, and trust. Spotlight straightforward brand and product updates, but also:

• Company events, especially videos

• Charitable participation on a company or individual level

• New package designs

• Prominent new hires like VP roles or appointments to the board

• Links to industry or market events

• Employee favorites from your product or service line

Which teams should you involve?

• Social

• Corporate

• Communications

• Marketing

• Web

• Design

• Sales

Brand awareness

REI maintains multiple #REIGifts Pinterest boards to stay top of mind with different audiences — kids, hikers, gadget lovers, etc

Many people keep up with brand accounts to stay on top of an entire industry or product category, so make sure the content you share is truly relevant and valuable. Having trouble determining what “relevant” means to your audience? Lean on the personas and customer journeys you have developed to see if your content meets their needs. Industry-specific and topic-specific hashtags are a great way of surfacing your content to the right audience.

Share your research and other content with well-known bloggers and influencers and invite them to share insights with their readers and fans. Repurpose articles and white papers into sequential blog posts to help grow your readership over time.

You can also share:

• Proprietary white papers, best practice guides, and pertinent articles, as well as third-party materials your audience might find valuable

• Tips or creative ideas about how to use products

• Outside studies on industry trends and user perceptions

• Videos with key researchers, product designers, and other subject matter experts

• Industry-related infographics and charts

• Tip: Strive for personalization, relevance, and anticipation with your content

Brand awareness

Royal Caribbean’s Countless Wows campaign boosted awareness by amplifying customer photos and stories in real time.

Highlighting user-generated content is one of the best ways to grow brand awareness because it gets people engaged and encourages them to share news of your brand across their networks, increasing exposure and driving engagement.

Customer stories highlight your brand’s uniqueness, help shape your brand’s personality, and help your audience personally relate to your product. Research shows that people are more likely to believe authentic customer feedback than anything brands say themselves. Running a contest, such as a photography challenge or a retail styling challenge, can be a great way to gather UGC and get data on your customers (but always remain mindful of the FTC’s guidelines around disclosure). You might also consider inviting customers or social media influencers to write a guest post for your blog about interesting product experiences and successes.

Get your audience engaged by offering them a unique, intimate experience. Videos are particularly valuable, especially livestreaming (on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat) and immersive consumer experiences via virtual reality (VR) — embed such experiences on your homepage and include them in your posts.

After surfacing an organic tweet from Beyonce during the Superbowl, Airbnb kept up momentum by quickly retweeting with their own brand-centric wit.

• Keep your social network profiles complete and up to date. Many consumers may never visit your website, so social is your chance to make a great first impression and communicate important information.

• Determine which networks in your stack are best for brand awareness, especially for paid efforts, which ones allow you to target best, and which are most cost-effective for you.

• Devote resources to developing customer personas and journeys, so that social can support those journeys and target those personas.

• Identify the usage patterns of your target audiences so you can focus on the channels they use most.

• Research relevant keywords by using a social marketing tool like Khoros Marketing (which offers unlimited searches) and use these keywords in your descriptors and tags.

• Own and post to a hashtag that can be used by anyone else to provide you with user-generated content (UGC) (like Coca-Cola does with #ShareACoke or Charmin’s #TweetFromTheSeat).

• Keep all social media interactions with customers and fans consistent with your brand’s voice, and make sure your team follows guidelines for when and how to respond to comments and direct messages.

• Share relevant user-generated and third-party content. Highlight influencers in your community and encourage them to be a part of your brand story.

• Tailor content for each platform: for example, Snapchat is informal and intimate and not for straight promotional materials, while Instagram is more polished. LinkedIn is professional, while Facebook is more casual.

• Include messaging apps like WeChat, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp in your integrated brand campaigns.

The Khoros Marketing solution helps you simplify your social media marketing operations with one platform to manage all of your enterprise social accounts. Our software is built for the enterprise and we are invested in your success, with industryleading support and product coaching to increase brand awareness and accelerate sales. Request a demo today to learn more.

Key features:

• Publishing, Planning, and Labelling

• Governance and Approvals

• Analytics and Reporting

• Paid and Organic Management

• Moderation and Listening

Success story: Hagerty

By developing a strategy with the Khoros Strategic Services Team and leveraging Khoros Marketing, Hagerty was able to expand its audience to all car enthusiasts and bring in more followers on social media.

Key results:

• 43% year-over-year follower growth

• 127% increase in Instagram impressions

• 146% increase in Twitter engagement