How To Prove and Measure The Results of Brand Awareness on Social Media
Brand awareness is a tricky metric, and that’s also the reason why so many brands look the other way and pretend like they’re not listening when the question comes up for discussion.
And this is of course not a good thing. Social media can do a lot for your brand. It can generate results that are easy to measure, and it can generate results that are difficult to measure. But no matter what your main objective with social media is, brand awareness will always be a by-product of your efforts that boost your brand’s recognition. And when you are evaluating your results, you want to include this important metric into the equation as well.
The truth is that the brand awareness generated by your social media efforts don’t have to be difficult to measure. In fact, it can be simplified – a lot. With a clear strategy on how you’re going to measure it step-by-step, that brand awareness is something that is difficult to measure will soon be a false statement.
In this article, I’ll give you practical tips on how you can make your brand awareness measuring simplified, and how you can measure your brand awareness results on social media.
Why does this matter?
Social awareness metrics (brand awareness being a big player in the game), like interactions, reach, and impact is often used by marketers to demonstrate how social media is helping a brand achieve its business goals, and these represent how well your brand’s messages are resonating and spreading to your audience. But in order to demonstrate and show that social media is actually generating any results, being able to measure them is vital to being able present anything to the table. If you don’t know how to measure brand awareness or have a specific formula for measuring it, brand awareness will only be something highly abstract.
In other words, fairy dust.
How to measure brand awareness
1. Set goals and benchmarks
Did you know that 79.4% of brands on Twitter use the platform to increase brand awareness? The only problem is that only a small portion of them know how to measure it and if they actually get any results.
In order to be able to measure brand awareness, the first thing you want to do is set clear benchmarks. This should be decided based on a timeframe. Preferably weekly or monthly.
With a baseline set, you will be able to prove how much you’re increasing brand awareness through social media.
The most accurate metrics for indicating brand awareness are the following:
- Followers: How many followers have you gained over your set period of time?
- Shares: How many times has your content been shared over your set period of time?
- Likes: How many likes have you received over your set period of time?
- Reach: How many people have your posts reached- how many people have seen them?
- Comments: How many comments have you received on your posts?
All of these metrics are super helpful because they all reflect brand awareness and the people you reach with your social media efforts. Every time you reach someone, you increase their brand awareness to you. Every time you are able to attract someone new to your page – either as a follower or a one-time visitor, you make them aware of your brand. This can be both unconscious brand awareness or conscious brand awareness.
If someone has taken the action to interact with your brand on social media, it’s most likely that it is the conscious brand awareness that has taken place. They are consciously interacting with your page and your content, and therefore they are aware of your brand, the content you share, and finally, they decide to interact with your content. If they are interacting with your content over and over again, their brand awareness in you only gets bigger and bigger because they get constantly reminded of you.
If they’ve just come across your page (reach), there’s a chance that this will result in unconscious brand awareness. What this means is that a while after, they might not remember your brand name or even your product, but the next time they encounter your brand, whether it be in real life, seeing an ad from you, or coming across you on social media again, your brand will feel familiar and there’s a bigger chance they’ll convert into a customer.
When you measure the listed metrics regularly in accordance to your set timeframe, you can set benchmarks to the brand awareness you are generating and how it changes over time. This can of course change for better or worse, and when you have your benchmarks, you can quickly see if you’re doing good or if you need to make some changes.
2. Execute your strategy
When you’ve set your benchmarks, it’s time to set your strategy in play. This strategy consists of things that will help you boost results in the listed metrics that are reflecting your brand awareness on social media. Brand awareness is the first step to making your audience more engaged. If people don’t even know of your existence, it will be difficult to make them more engaged, and ultimately impact them enough to making them customers.
3. Measure results
You’ve looked at the results you are generating as of now, you’ve set benchmarks, and you’ve created a strategy to how you will improve those results. Some time has passed, and you’ve worked to improve your results.
Now, it is time to measure your results to see if you”re working in the right direction. Measure the same metrics listed above as you did previously over the same timespan you set to see how your efforts have performed, and how they have helped you increase your brand awareness.
If you are doing good, and your strategy performs well, you can prove that your social media marketing strategy is making more people aware of your brand. With the help of very specific and easily-measured metrics – in the form of engagement metrics, you can read between the lines and get an understanding of the brand awareness you are generating with social media.
Understand the social conversation
Another way to measure and see your brand awareness on social media is to take a look at the conversations that are happening around your brand. When people are talking about your brand, it’s a clear sign that you’ve been able to impact them to the point where they are having conversations about you.
When people are talking about you, it also leads to more brand awareness, because they are constantly thinking of you, and they might even include new people who previously hadn’t heard about you into the discussion.
When looking at the social conversations, you also want to look at them in contrast to your main competitors to see how well you are doing with social brand awareness compared to them.
1. Calculate mentions of your brand
First, you want to have a timeframe of when and over which timeframes this is going to be done. Considering that you’ve already set your timeframe, you can just follow your existing one without having to create a new one.
When you increase brand awareness, you are also increasing the chance of people talking about your brand on social media. This is also why mentions of your brand are so helpful because they reflect the brand awareness you are driving
When looking at the mentions of your brand on social, don’t only look at the @ mentions of your brand, you should also look at your branded hashtag, the search term filter on Twitter, indirect mentions, and potential misspellings. This will ensure you that you are not missing out on any conversation that is taking place.
2. Calculate mentions of your competitors
Here, you want to do exactly the same as you did above- only that you are doing it for your competitors. This will give you interesting numbers that allow you to compare yourself with them, and see how you are performing compared to them.
If you notice a huge difference between you and your competitor, try to understand what it is they are doing to increase their brand awareness and encouraging conversation.
Conclusion
Brand awareness is a metric that is incredibly difficult to measure, and this is also the reason to why so many marketers ignore it. The only problem is that brand awareness is such an important metric that is the result of basically everything you do on social media. Therefore, ignoring it would be missing out on the true potential social media has.
By creating clear ways to measuring brand awareness, measuring it will be as easy as measuring any other type of metric.
