Social Media Brand Awareness Metrics: More Than Likes and Comments

When most people consider their brand’s success on social channels they jump immediately to wanting tons of likes, comments, and followers on their profiles. While these factors are important in many cases, there’s more to social media than these tracking measures. 

One of the most important aspects of establishing your brand is focusing on social media brand awareness metrics. That’s a mouthful … let us break it down. 

Brand awareness can be broken down into two parts: brand recall and brand recognition. Brand recall is how easily users remember your brand. After someone looks at your profile or sees one of your ads, is it memorable? 

On the other hand, brand recognition is determined by your audience’s ability to differentiate your brand from others. What is it that sets Coca-Cola apart from Pepsi? Or Franzia from your favorite top-shelf wine?

The ultimate goal is determining how to identify and show these factors in a virtual way, ie. on your social platforms. Sure you probably have a personal preference between the tastes of Coke and Pepsi, but how do the two brands communicate that to their audience? How do they ensure that they are remembered for their unique traits and individuality when you walk down the soda aisle at the grocery store and decide which cans to grab? 

Brand Awareness in Social Media 

So now that we’ve introduced the basics, how do they relate to social media brand awareness metrics? 

Tracking engagement on social profiles is about more than just counting likes and comments. Building an organic following that is genuinely engaged and invested in your brand is key. Buying thousands of followers for a few hundred bucks off of a sketchy site is not only not worth your money, but it also has the potential to get you banned on Instagram. Not something you want. 

While investing in an organic social media strategy takes more time overall, you’re likely to get a more efficient payoff because of it. 

As previously discussed, the ultimate goal of sharing content, be it in the form of a blog, video, or social post, is to get your brand name out there and be recognized and remembered. Having thousands of followers is getting you nowhere if they aren’t genuinely engaging with your brand. 

One of the best ways to build a relationship with your audience is to develop a humanistic brand voice. Determining a way to relate to your audience is key and will help promote your brand in a way that’s memorable and real. 

Social Media Brand Awareness Metrics

So we’ve been saying that social media is about more than just likes and comments. But then how do you track your success in a quantitative way? 

There are additional metrics that can be tracked that provide crying insights into the success of your brand on social media. 

Reach 

Reach represents the number of people who viewed your content. Just because someone doesn’t follow you or didn’t like or comment on your photo, doesn’t mean they didn’t see it. Making memorable content is key!

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times that your content has been viewed. For example, if one person views your IGTV video 5 times, it would have a reach of not 1, but 5 impressions. 

Engagement

Engagement is the total amount of direct engagement that a post receives. It includes a sum of the likes, comments, shares, and saves of a single post. 

Brand Mentions 

Having people talk about your brand across social media platforms is ideal. Word of mouth marketing is difficult to force and is most effective when it happens organically. While influencer marketing has continued to grow over recent years as social media has boomed, paying an influencer a lump sum to talk about your brand in a single post isn’t always necessary. 

Brand mentions can come from your top customers, current clients, family, friends, and the like. The goal is to reach new circles of people that you may not have on your own. 

Overall, utilizing social media brand awareness metrics is critical for gauging your success on varying platforms. That being said, reviewing metrics goes beyond just likes and comments. 

For more information and resources on social media tracking and strategy development, check out our blog. If you’re looking to get started with an outsourced marketing partnership and want to see what our Digital Storyteller team can do for you, give us a call today to get started with a Brand Storytelling Session.