Brand awareness is the extent to which your target audience recognizes and remembers your brand. It's a crucial element of your social media strategy, as it can influence your reach, engagement, and conversions. But how do you measure your social media impact on brand awareness? Here are some tips and tools to help you track and improve your brand visibility online.
Prior to measuring your social media impact on brand awareness, you need to determine your goals and metrics. Ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish with your social media presence, who you are trying to reach and influence, and how you will know if you are successful. Depending on your objectives, you may want to measure brand awareness with different metrics, such as impressions, reach, mentions, shares, followers, and sentiment. Impressions measure the number of times your content is displayed on social media platforms. Reach is the number of unique users who see your content. Mentions track the number of times your brand name or hashtag is used by other users. Shares count the number of times your content is redistributed by other users. Followers count the number of users who subscribe to your social media accounts. Finally, sentiment tracks the tone and emotion of comments and feedback you receive on social media platforms.
The measurement of brand awareness goes to both the quantitative aspects of numbers and approaches, especially the qualitative aspects, then analyzed how the brand is perceived by customers, consumers and the general public. Starting from an analysis of awareness, it is possible to identify whether the brand is linked to something conceived or pre-conceived, whether it can be seen and whether its image is recurrent or "embraced" in positive or negative form, for example. You can also measure your brand awareness in social listening: Use your brand health (percentage of positive and neutral comments) to identify your brand's temperature in social media monitoring and broaden your view from a quantitative and qualitative point of view.
Once you have your goals and metrics, you need to choose the tools and platforms that will help you collect and analyze your data. There are many options available, from native analytics tools provided by social media platforms, such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, to third-party tools such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social. You may want to look for features such as the ability to monitor and compare multiple social media platforms and channels, segment and filter your data by demographics, location, time, and keywords, generate and export reports and dashboards that visualize your data and insights, or benchmark and compare your performance against your competitors and industry standards.
Proprietary social media analytics tools are super important. See, for example, the importance of Tik Tok Analytics, increasingly focused on sales and also on stores) and Social Listening. Use listening to monitor your feedback and your competitors' feedback using tools like BrandWatch, Emplifi or Sprinklr. There are several options on the market for small and large businesses, as well as local tools in your country that you can use. This is the case of Brazil, which has Slingue, VTracker, BuzzMonitor, for example.
After you have chosen your tools and platforms, it’s important to track and optimize your performance regularly. Monitor your metrics to see how they change over time and how they relate to your goals and strategies. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats in your market. Consider questions such as which social media platforms and channels are generating the most impressions, reach, mentions, shares, followers, and sentiment for your brand? What types of content are resonating the most with your target audience? How are you performing compared to competitors and industry standards in terms of brand awareness and perception? What are the best practices and trends in your niche? And what challenges and risks do you face?
By measuring your social media impact on brand awareness, you can gain valuable insights into your brand visibility, reputation, and value online. This data can be used to inform and improve your social media strategy in order to align it with overall marketing and business goals. Ultimately, this will help you increase brand awareness and grow audience engagement, conversions on social media.
Two types of mindsets in your brand help measure brand awareness: looking in and looking out. Looking in: analyze how your brand is positioned, what are the main KPIs (key performance indicators) in visits, users, views and engagement on your website; measure the comments obtained on proprietary networks; analyze social media comments to measure your sentiment and your reputation and number of mentions. Looking out: go further and also measure the share of voice, both the share in your networks in relation to competitors and the share of voice of your brand (%) compared to the other competitors you have, who has the highest positive brand awareness in networks and the worst brand awareness towards you.