Many brands chase the pot of gold known as “growing brand awareness,” but few companies ever set measurements for how much brand awareness they really have.
Luckily, social media offers several metrics for tracking brand awareness.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness can be thought of in a few different dimensions:
- Brand recall: How easily someone remembers your brand
- Brand recognition: How easily someone can differentiate your brand from others
These can be difficult concepts to quantify. Especially because most brands care most about sales and ROI, so brand awareness can feel like an abstract concept. But brand awareness is still a necessary part of the profit equation. After all, there’s a reason Coca Cola spent $4.25 billion on advertising in 2019.
Here’s a quick dive into how you can measure brand awareness on social media.
Social Media Brand Awareness Metrics You Can Track
There are many ways to track your brand awareness through social media.
Here’s the lowdown on each metric:
Impressions
The number of times your content has been viewed, including repeat views from a single person. If your content has multiple impressions with the same audience members, it means you’re creating compelling content that’s likely to increase brand recall.
Reach
The number of people who have viewed your content. A growing organic reach means you’re growing the size of your audience by gaining followers or earning shares.If your brand cares most about how many people know who you are, this may be the metric to track.
Engagement (Rate)
The number of likes, comments, and shares your posts receive, or the average number of likes, comments, and shares per post. This shows how much people interact with your content, which is an indicator of how much your brand resonates with them.
Brand Mentions
The number of times people mention your brand in their posts, whether they tag your profile or just mention your brand name. This shows whether there’s any buzz around your brand.
Share of Voice
The percentage of total mentions in an industry that mention your brand.
Raw impression or reach numbers may not mean much to your company if you don’t know how you’re performing relative to your industry. Share of voice lets you track how much of the total possible audience attention you’ve earned.
Audience Sentiment
The emotional tone of posts about your brand.
They say all publicity is good publicity, but that doesn’t ring true on the internet. Sometimes, a huge number of brand mentions or impressions can be for the wrong reasons—like a PR nightmare—so tracking whether your brand mentions are positive or negative may be a necessary part of your brand awareness tracking.
Is There a Brand Awareness Calculation?
Because there’s no one true measure of brand awareness, what brand awareness metric makes the most sense to track will depend on how your company earns revenue or values its brand.
For example, if you’re a publication that earns money from ad revenue, you likely care most about pure volume metrics like impressions and reach.
However, if you’re a B2B brand that does low-volume business in a niche industry, you may care more about share of voice or engagement.
Track Brand Awareness with Keyhole
All of these brand awareness metrics can be easily tracked with Keyhole’s brand monitoring tools.
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