So if your main objective on social is boosting brand awareness, then these metrics are integral to proving success. Compare this data to your benchmarks and, if all goes well, you’ll be able to prove that your social strategy is making more people aware of—and engaged with—your brand on social media. For example, we would track all mentions of our @Hootsuite handle as well as indirect mentions of “hootsuite,” “hoot suite,” and so on. Are people aware of your brand?
Proving the ROI of social media is a complicated task for any organization. But it gets even trickier if your organization is primarily using social to achieve business objectives that aren’t directly tied to revenue—like brand awareness.
Brand awareness is obviously crucial to your bottom line (if people don’t know about you, they can’t buy from you), so it’s important you know how to quantifiably prove how social media is impacting this goal.
When it comes to your brand, there are two main areas to focus on:
- Awareness: Increasing the amount of people that know about your brand.
- Perception: Changing how people think and feel about your brand.
You need different strategies to achieve these objectives, and different metrics to measure them. In this post, we’ll focus on using social media to increase brand awareness and three ways you can measure that impact, depending on your level of social media maturity:
- Beginner: Driving brand awareness through social engagement
- Intermediate: Increasing social share of voice to gain a competitive advantage
- Advanced: Improving brand recall through social ads
Beginner: Driving brand awareness through social engagement
Why it matters
Social engagement metrics such as followers, likes, comments, and shares are sometimes called “vanity” metrics, since they’re often used by social marketers to toot their horn while neglecting to demonstrate how social is actually impacting business goals. But these metrics are the currency of social media, and they represent how well your brand’s messages are resonating and spreading. So if your main objective on social is boosting brand awareness, then these metrics are integral to proving success.
How to measure it
1. Set benchmarks
To prove how much you’re increasing brand awareness through social, you need a baseline to measure your progress. Choose a time period (either weekly or monthly) and use a tool like Hootsuite Analytics to gather the following metrics:
- Reach: How many people saw your posts
- Followers: How many new followers (or Page likes) you gained
- Likes: How many likes your posts received
- Comments: How many comments were left on your posts
- Shares: How many times your content was shared or retweeted
It’s important to measure how these metrics change over multiple weeks or months so you can use the averages to…
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