With social media trends, how you conduct yourself online is just as important as how you do offline. In other words, social media is more than a medium of online entertainment, it is a lifestyle.
Nowadays, we create, react to, or share feeds about our lifestyles or thoughts on social media. Therefore, harnessing the unlimited potentials of social media can grow your brand. Granted, it takes a lot of work. But when done right, you can advance your digital marketing career, make valuable connections, and build a lasting legacy.
So, keep reading as we explore harnessing the social media trends for brand growth.
What is brand growth?
Brand growth simply refers to strategically enhancing the visibility of a business, with the aim of reaching new customers and solidifying a relationship with the existing ones. In the past, it involved opening new outlets, and advertising through the traditional media like flyers, television and radio jingles.
In this age of digital marketing, brand growth involves reaching and engaging with customers through websites and social media. It is also about creating brand awareness and fostering audience engagements through social media posts.
Role of social media trends for brand growth
Social media has proven to be an essential platform for brand growth. By increasing brand awareness and engaging with the target audience, a business can grow into a sustainable success.
- Vast audience reach
There are about 5.24 billion social media users in the world. This means social media offers an unlimited audience reach, which can be a potential goldmine for brand growth.
With billions of users, businesses can target specific demographics and engage with their target audience more effectively than the traditional media. Social media also fosters interactions, meaning that brands can connect with their audience and build a lasting relationship with them through visually appealing posts, competitions and giveaways.
- Diverse social media platforms
Social media platforms are vast, with billions of active users. Many of these platforms are more regional than others, making it easy for businesses to identify which platform suits their brand growth.
For instance, a cooking brand will do better on YouTube than on X (formerly Twitter). A news media may do better on X and Facebook than on Instagram. A fashion brand may also do better on Instagram than on Snapchat, and so on.
- Customer insights
Social media enables businesses to collect valuable data on customer behavior, preferences, and feedback. This information can help companies refine their brands, including improving their products and services. They can also be used to refine their marketing strategies.
For instance, collecting audience feedback for a baby diaper product can help the brand know what the customer wants. With the information, they can correct any mistakes and make improvements that suit the preferences of their target customers.
- Affordable marketing
Social media has proven to be less expensive than the traditional media in terms of advertising. With less funds and strategic marketing, businesses can reach their target audience based on demographics, interests, and online behaviors.
For instance, a fashion brand for female wears can simply engage women of certain ages as its target audience. This automatically cuts down the cost of advertising to a broader audience to gain potential customers.
Creating audience engagement through social media trends
- Identify which social media platform suits your brand
To get the best out of social media trends, you must consider the type of brand you have. Some platforms may work better than the others depending on the type of brand you want to grow. For instance, a visual platform like Instagram, where you share images and videos, is great for brands in fashion, photography, travel, art, fitness, and lifestyle.
X is great for sharing insights, news, curating content, alongside relevant hashtags to gain more audience. LinkedIn works well with showcasing expertise and career achievements, while YouTube is great for educational and entertaining videos.
- Create engaging content
Use visuals like photos, videos, and infographics, using compelling captions and headlines to gain and sustain the attention of your target audience. Make your brand sound personal, showcasing its human side, behind-the-scenes content, employee stories and customer stories to evoke emotions.
Try engaging your audience with interactive elements like polls, quizzes, or contests to encourage them to keep coming back.
- Be consistent with brand image, tone and voice
Sticking to your defined persona is important for brand growth. It is important to be consistent with the image, tone and voice of your brand if you want to appear original and reliable to your target audience.
Ensure the images you use are sharp, specific, with a catchy phrase. Find the tone of voice that works best for your brand. Utilize the language your audience understands in your posts, captions, and responses.
- Respond to comments and messages promptly
Responding to comments and messages promptly is a strategic tool that works in audience engagement on social media. This is your own way of showing that you value their feedback and opinions. As a result, your audience can feel seen and heard, making them more willing to connect with your brand.
- Run contests and giveaways
Contests and giveaways are proven strategic methods to engage with your target audience on social media. It can be as simple as asking your audience to like and comment on your post to gain an enticing price.
Sometimes, the price is not as expensive as many will expect. It can be something like winning a free jersey of a favorite club or winning a free class for business training.
- Partner with relevant influencers
Social media influencers may sound like a nuisance to some social media users, but they are an important part of growing your brand through audience engagement. Identify with influencers whose values and interests align with your brand.
Work with them to gain and engage your target audience through sponsored content, product reviews, or influencer takeovers. Influencers can build trust and credibility in your brand among customers.
Tracking social media metrics
- Reach, engagement, and impressions
Social media metrics such as reach, engagement, and impressions are vital for brand growth. These metrics can keep you updated about how your audience engages with your content. Reach refers to the number of people that have seen your social media post. Engagement showcases the level of interaction (likes, comments, shares) a post receives, while impression measures the number of times a post appears to users.
Analysing these metrics can give you an idea of how your brand is engaging with your audience. They can also help you make some adjustments in your campaign to gain new audiences and keep the existing ones.
- Analytics tools
Analytics tools like Google Analytics and social media insights provide valuable insights into the performance of social media campaigns. They can track metrics like reach, engagement, impressions, referral traffic, and conversions to not only reveal how a post is resonating with an audience, but to reveal areas that need to be improved. For instance, Google Analytics can show which social media platform gains more traffic than others. This enables you to understand where you will most likely gain the target audience for your brand and do the needful.
- Referral traffic and conversions
Referral traffic and conversions help to drive social media users to your website and landing pages, where you stand a better chance of converting them into customers or leads. This type of organic traffic can be trusted because it is often made by users who have tried your product or services.
For instance, a customer who is happy with your skincare product can share the link of your brand’s website on their social media handles. Chances of attracting potential customers through this method is usually high.
Conclusion
Social media trends can make growing a brand easy and cost-effective. Identify the best platform for your brand, post engaging content, maintain a consistent brand image, tone and voice. Additionally, engage with your audience by responding to their reactions and running some interactive contests and rewards, partner with relevant influencers to drive more traffic to your brand which can be converted to paying customers or leads.
Then track your progress using social media metrics to discover how your campaign is resonating with your audience and make some necessary adjustments.
