Are Brands Creating Awareness through Social Media?
The benefits of a strong brand create a sense of brand loyalty among customers that reflects the brand and entices other stakeholders. Brand integration through social media is vital, as stakeholders are increasingly spending more and more time on social media sites. We asked 500 social media users a series of questions, assessing how brands are currently engaging with users through social media marketing. With 32% of participants saying, ‘yes they engage with brands,’ and 37% saying they engage with brands, ‘sometimes,’ it demonstrates that brand awareness has been successful through social media marketing tactics, totalling to 69% of the respondents supporting this.
This is supported by 23% of respondents who said that they like/follow a brands social media page because they are a genuine fan of the product/service, demonstrating a brand loyalty and consequently creating a brand awareness amongst existing customers, which are subsequently the most important group of stakeholders a brand should be targeting first on social media sites. This answer was the second most popular, ahead of basic social media marketing tactics such as offering promotional offers/incentives to fans and paid Facebook/Twitter advertisement, further supporting the idea that brands have successfully created awareness through social media. However funny posts and updates was by far the strongest form of engagement through social media with 30% of participants arguing that this form of content is most likely to encourage them to follow/like their favourite brands.
It is fair to say that established brands have unconsciously created a sense of brand awareness through existing brand loyal customers; however it is more important to consider whether start-ups during this social media revolution have created brand awareness from the initial launch and growth. This represents a greater challenge to measure, as implications such as intangible difficulties within a business measuring the result of social media marketing and its return on investment for a company can present teething problems.
#TheFutureOfMarketing
#TheFutureOfMarketing
By Chris Kyriacou