Prevailing marketing wisdom tells you to go where your audience is. And if nearly every American who has a computer is on Facebook, then most of your audience is likely there. And while there is a lot of truth to that, just because your audience is there does not mean it is aware of you. Building brand awareness on social media requires a different approach than traditional media. You need a strategy that is custom tailored to your brand and audience; cookie cutter approaches will only take you so far.
Here are some Facebook tactics along with insights on when they are or are not effective. This is not a formula; it is a set of tools that will broaden your social media branding arsenal. You need to develop your own unique social media strategy and discover how you can best apply these tools.
1. Facebook Ads
These are pay per click (PPC) ads with custom images and text that can link users pages within Facebook or anywhere on the web. These work best when you have a compelling message and a very interested and easily segmented target audience. These drive traffic as much as awareness. Facebook ads do not work as well with small or local niche audiences because if the ads do not get a steady stream of clicks, Facebook will slowly stop showing the ads until they disappear entirely.
2. Get More Page Likes
This is another paid feature where you are essentially buying impressions of an ad that allows users to easily like your page. This feature is an excellent way to grow your brand’s following, provided of course you already have enough awareness to motivate users to like you. It works great for friendly consumer facing brands like ice cream shops. However this feature is not as effective for niche B2B brands that have very little general awareness.
3. Promote Page Posts
This paid feature enables a brand to boost the exposure that one of its page posts receives among the fans who currently like that page. The effectiveness of this feature depends on how large a following your brand’s page has, and how engaged those followers are. This is not a great way to expand your following, but rather it helps deepen brand awareness among current followers.
4. Interesting Content
Almost everyone agrees that posting interesting and valuable content is of primary importance online. But that assumes that the right audience is able to find your content. To build brand awareness you do need valuable content but you also need to work on ways to attract attention to that content.
5. Viral Content
There are two levels here, high viral and low viral. High viral makes you famous almost overnight while low viral simply means highly sharable. High viral is a bit like looking for the Holy Grail; keep after it, but you cannot count on finding it. Meanwhile low viral is a consistently accomplishable objective. What makes content low viral is usually some image driven combination of humor, wit, cuteness, or intrigue. Think pictures of babies, food, striking scenery, breaking news, and so on. This approach works great to help your content and brand awareness travel farther, but it is only effective if the content is relevant to your brand.
Your final goal is to develop brand supporters and eventually brand advocates. But everything starts with awareness. Experiment with some of these tactics and refine your social media strategy to maximize brand awareness.
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