Social media means maintaining relevance: the reality of our fast evolving digital landscape means that businesses that don’t make use of social media fall behind.
Here’s how to make use of social media as an avenue to build your brand into something compelling, familiar and trustworthy.
Key Takeaways:
- Choose the platform that suits your goals – are you looking to foster community or provide entertainment?
- Use social media’s unique storytelling abilities to boost engagement with your business
- Consistency is the key to social media marketing success
- Taking the time to interact with your audience daily generates public interest in your services
- Collaborate with influencers to improve your visibility
- Craft an online presence unique to your mission
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the extent to which people recognise and remember your brand. It’s about making your name, logo, and values stick in the minds of your audience so that when they think of your industry, they think of you first. Strong brand awareness builds trust, drives engagement, and lays the foundation for customer loyalty.
Types of Brand Awareness
Aided: when people can pick your brand out of a lineup by association with a particular colour, jingle, design or tagline. For example, a soft drink with red packaging may make someone think of Coca-Cola. Or closer to home, a bright orange building may cue images of Rollickin Gelato.
Unaided: when people associate your brand with a general concept, without cues. For example, if someone wants to buy pain medication, they refer to it as ‘Panadol.’ The brand has become a common term for a need.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness matters because it helps people recognise and trust your brand. When customers know who you are, they’re more likely to choose you over competitors, engage with your content, and stay loyal.
The 95-5 rule in marketing posits that only 5% of potential customers are in the buying phase at any given time. It’s a smart move to invest in that 95%, building brand awareness for when they enter that 5% ready to buy.
Strong awareness also lowers marketing costs, boosts conversions, and makes it easier to launch new products or enter new markets. In short, it’s the foundation for long-term growth and customer relationships.
How is Social Media Useful for Brand Awareness?
Social Media is useful for building brand awareness because its strength is curating brand identity; connecting audiences directly to your brand. Social media is often either underused or not used in exactly the right ways to get what you want from your business.
Whichever platform you choose, all are excellent at customising a brand identity.
They allow direct, personal communication with potential customers where you may present your company as a person, or personable entity.
This can facilitate more authentic loyalty due to a feeling of ‘knowing’ your brand.
They allow direct, personal communication with potential customers where you may present your company as a person, or personable entity. This can facilitate more authentic loyalty due to a feeling of ‘knowing’ your brand.
The constant advance of social channels make it feel difficult to tailor social media strategy to different platforms efficiently. We’ve put together a list of recommended approaches for the major players.
Instagram: A story-based platform
Audience Need: Primarily entertainment and escapism. Audiences are looking to connect, either through emotional moments, fun distraction or relatable content. Although thought of as an app for a younger viewership, don’t be fooled: many other age demographics are seeking the same things.
Our Content Ideas:
- Post first-take, authentic videos that follow your business’s journey (where did you start from?) It’s okay if these are not perfectly edited, a well performing trend at the moment is rough and real content.
- A day in the life
- Videos that connect with individual people; their opinions, interesting snippets of their work, captured office/team dynamics
- Cute videos of an office/team member’s pet
- Get your people participating in the latest trend
- You could use casual language that feels less distant from real viewers, depending on your desired image.
Although it may seem strange to mention Instagram as it’s definitely not a traditional B2B channel, it is performing at an improved ROI (up to 4x the ROAS) compared to platforms like LinkedIn.
Facebook: Fostering Community
Audience Need: Generally, an older audience that seeks connection. It is a more static, community group organisation based platform. A large demographic on Facebook (age 25-34) at 31% of users is active in lifestyle, career and social commerce content. Older audiences typically seek family updates, local news and group activities.
Our Content Ideas:
- Advertise community events associated with your brand or putting a spotlight on your product/service
- Foster a community that regularly posts updates about what you’re doing
- High quality photos of your work in action
- Short video tutorials
- Video day in the life
- Run a hashtag campaign that gets people posting content related to your business (eg #myecosipmoment)
- Interactive posts such as polls asking for opinions on topical issues
- YouTube: Follow the journey
Audience Need: a desire for longer form entertainment, detailed face to face instruction and community engagement.
Our Content Ideas:
- Educational Tutorials: How-to guides, SEO tips, industry explainers
- Product Demonstrations: Feature walkthroughs, unboxing, comparisons
- Behind-the-Scenes: Office tour, team intros, product creation process
- Customer Stories: Testimonials, success stories, real-world use cases
- Explain your leadership: Trend insights, expert interviews, opinion pieces
- Interactive Content: Q&A sessions, polls, challenges, live streams
X: Share Your Opinions
Although we know X isn’t for everyone, it is a platform that doesn’t penalise and so is useful to test content on.
Audience Need: All things discourse. On the world, relatable commentary, witty observations, sharing opinions, community discourse. People are open to engaging with brands if they present themselves as interesting, entertaining or adding valuable insight to current events. X content really depends on the image you want to project, so we've covered a variety of angles.
Our Content Ideas:
- Quick Tips & Insights: Share bite-sized advice or industry hacks
- Trending Topics: Join conversations using relevant hashtags
- Polls & Questions: “Which feature do you want next?” or “What’s your biggest challenge?”
- Visual Snippets: Infographics, charts, or short videos.
- Share opinions on industry updates or current news that affects your business
- Customer Highlights: Retweet testimonials
- Steer away from clinging to your brand to engage in topics semi relevant that you can share witty remarks on
engage in (friendly but competitive for example) threads with competitors
- Promotions & Announcements: Flash sales, product launches, or event invites.
- Engage with Others: Reply to trending tweets, quote industry leaders.
- Threads: Break down complex topics into a series of tweets (e.g., “5 steps to map your customer journey”).
The Importance of Consistency in Social Media Marketing
We recommend that you aim to post short form content daily. The algorithm will never consistently favor content that is highly sporadic, no matter how perfectly tailored to the audience or platform it is.
Think of posting consistently as building up the algorithm's trust in your account. It's best practice to have a ready made content stock ready and waiting to be posted to different platforms This way you can post consistently without stressing over sacrificing quality. If people see your content often, they become aware of your brand.
Consistency in Brand Presentation
Design is everything, and it's just as important to maintain across social media output. If you keep your logo and visual elements of your content consistent, you solidify visual elements as being associated with your business.
Starbucks is a good example; its dark green colour scheme and logo are present across all platforms, and as a consequence people are very aware of the brand in the wild. On platforms like Instagram claiming visual features can be subtle and also incredibly useful.
A Consistent Attitude
Presenting your brand as a notable personality is one of social media's best and under exploited opportunities. While other marketing platforms require a more polished approach, channels like Instagram and X allow for personality. If appropriate, it could be a brilliant strategic move to map out your business's approach to social media in terms of its personable attributes.
Be really clear on what your company wants, likes and will interact with online. What persona do you want people to connect to your brand?
A Case Study: Duolingo
Duolingo is a remarkable example of projecting personality onto a brand on social media. On platforms such as Instagram and X, it was known for witty comments, cheeky replies to user comments, and very much participating in the platform. One wacky example is their tweet to Dua Lipa, which went viral overnight:
“do you love me back @DUALIPA”
The wacky, fun feeling they've curated online is so effective that when they deleted all social content, people taking notice of their absence dominated social media.
It just goes to show that engagement with users right where they're at can skyrocket engagement, cementing your brand in consumers' minds as someone to keep coming back to.
Build Brand Awareness through Storytelling using Social Media
Storytelling on social media is a powerful way to build brand awareness. By sharing authentic, relatable stories, you turn your brand into an experience that connects emotionally and stands out in a crowded digital space. Here’s some tips for an effective approach:
- Create content containing emotional plot points that showcase the values of your brand. This could be following the journey of how you started to where you are now as a company. Alternatively, content focusing on the difference your product or service makes in people's everyday lives is always compelling. It's an opportunity to create that authentic feel; nothing has to be too polished.
- Fold your brand into escapism. Achieving better visibility doesn't have to mean your logo is front and center; a better focus takes people somewhere beautiful or entertaining. For example, an outdoor gear company could create a cinematic short video showing their product on a serene mountain hike, focusing on the experience rather than the product specs.
- The Key Tip: the best social media ad should be one you can't immediately decipher. Users scrolling short form content are looking to be entertained. While classical, up front advertising builds brand awareness on traditionally work orientated platforms like Google Ads or LinkedIn, the more social channels need subtlety. Aim to create ads that entertain while giving your product a cameo, as well as bolder ones on occasion.
Once you’ve built up an audience, make sure to keep interacting with that community. This maintains the interest in the story your brand is writing.
The Importance of Interacting with Your Audience
Engagement isn’t just a metric. It’s how you build relationships with your brand. When you respond to comments, ask questions, and create interactive content, you make your brand feel approachable and helpful.
Why it matters:
- Boosts engagement and visibility in algorithms
- Reinforces your brand's curated personality and tone
- Builds trust by showing you care about your audience’s input.
Where to Interact:
- Polls: “Which feature should we launch next?”
- Reply Strategy: Respond to comments with humor or helpful tips.
- Interactive Posts: “Tag a friend who needs this!” or “Drop your favorite eco-friendly hack below.”
Once you’ve built up relationships with your audience through everyday interactions, you should aim to expand your channel’s reach by working with influencers. Choose influencers that align with your channel’s content and values.
How Can I Utilise Influencers?
You should aim to partner with influencers. Influencer collaborations add variety and credibility to your content. They help you tap into new audiences and create authentic endorsements that feel less like ads.
Why it matters:
- Expands reach by sharing audiences
- Adds fresh perspectives and creative content styles
- Builds trust through social proof
Examples:
- Product Reviews: Influencer unboxing videos on Instagram or YouTube.
- Co-Created Content: Joint live sessions with leadership or tutorials.
- Giveaways: “Follow both accounts and tag a friend to win!”
The Bottom Line: Social Media is a Vital Component of Digital Marketing.
In a technologically evolving digital landscape, the human approach via social media doesn't lose its viability. Social media reaches people on a personal level, using stories they care about to drive business awareness.
Don't underestimate the importance of your social media presence. It rapidly boosts brand awareness via bringing people to content they care about, made by you.
