Brand Awareness Metrics on Social Media: The Key to Growing Your Small Business

As a small business owner, you know that getting new business is essential for growth and success. In today's digital age, social media can be a game-changer for increasing your visibility and attracting new customers. However, to truly harness the power of social media, you need to track your brand awareness metrics. That's where we come in - at Maven and Muse Media, we specialize in social media management services that can help you grow your business and stand out in your industry.

The importance of brand awareness on social media cannot be overstated. It's not just about having a presence on various platforms - it's about creating meaningful connections with your target audience and establishing your brand as a go-to in your industry. To do this, you need to track your brand awareness metrics to see what's working and what's not.

Key Brand Awareness Metrics

There are several key metrics that you should be tracking to measure your brand awareness on social media. Here are the most important ones:

Reach

Reach refers to the number of people who see your content. The more people you reach, the more awareness you'll generate for your brand. To increase your reach, you can try tactics like posting at optimal times, using hashtags, and collaborating with influencers.

Impressions

Impressions refer to the number of times your content is displayed. Unlike reach, impressions can count multiple views from the same user. It's important to understand the difference between reach and impressions, as both metrics can provide valuable insights into your social media performance.

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate measures the level of interaction that users have with your content. This includes likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement. A high engagement rate indicates that your content is resonating with your audience and can help boost your brand awareness.

Follower Growth

Follower growth refers to the number of new followers you gain over a period of time. This metric is a good indicator of how well your brand is resonating with your target audience. To grow your followers, you can try tactics like running contests, using paid ads, and cross-promoting on other platforms.

Share of Voice

Share of voice measures the percentage of conversations about your brand compared to your competitors. This metric can help you understand how your brand stacks up against others in your industry and identify areas for improvement.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic measures the amount of traffic that comes to your website from social media platforms. By analyzing your referral traffic, you can see which platforms are driving the most traffic and adjust your social media strategy accordingly.

Social Media Platform Specific Metrics

Each social media platform has its own set of metrics that you should be tracking. Here are some of the key metrics for the most popular platforms:

Facebook

• Page Likes

• Post Reach

• Engagement (reactions, comments, shares)

Twitter

• Follower count

• Retweets

• Mentions

Instagram

• Follower count

• Engagement (likes, comments, saves)

• Instagram Stories metrics

LinkedIn

• Company followers

• Engagement (likes, comments, shares)

• Profile Clicks

Utilizing Analytics Tools

There are several social media analytics tools that you can use to track your brand awareness metrics. Some examples include native platform analytics, Google Analytics, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social. It's important to use these tools consistently and analyze the data to see what's working and what's not.

Setting Goals and Creating a Strategy

To truly harness the power of social media, you need to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for building your brand awareness. This could include goals like increasing your reach by a certain percentage or growing your followers by a specific number. Once you have your goals in place, you can develop a content strategy that supports them.

Contact Maven and Muse Media

Tracking your brand awareness metrics on social media is essential for growing your small business and standing out in your industry. 

At Maven and Muse Media, we provide social media management services to help you achieve your goals and take your business to the next level. Focusing on key metrics and utilizing analytics tools can create a social media strategy that drives results and generates buzz for your brand. Contact us today or sign up for our newsletter to learn more! 

There Isn't A One Size Fits All Social Media Strategy

I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, and a question that gets asked me in many different ways is, “How often do I need to post to be effective at this whole social media marketing thing?”  And unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size fits all strategy for each business.  There isn’t a plug-and-play method that is effective because what works for one business most likely won’t work for another business because the community of the account is different.  But here are a few things I do share that I consider the bare minimum part of a social media marketing strategy: posting three times a week to your feed is the bare minimum, checking in with your community on stories once a day a few times a week, I would encourage you to daily check in but know that this isn’t always feasible for business owners. When you are sharing a post to your feed a quick and easy way to share your story is to send the post to your story via the paper airplane at the bottom of the post. 

A few ideas for your story are anything behind the scenes, packing orders, setting up for an event, unboxing new merchandise, and asking your community questions. 

I also advise and use as part of my stories strategies with clients using the stories for market research. If you are trying to decide between an offering, packaging, or anything like that, ask your community. Humans are very good at giving their opinions and usually always seek opportunities to give them. 

I have tried to offer “one size fits all” social media templates, which fall flat because the voice is lost. When ’ is lost. When the post templates are done for everyone, they don’t feel like they need to contribute to the post, and the connection to the community isn’t there.  It all comes down to the intention of putting up the post in the first place. If you don’t know the intention behind sharing the post, your audience won’t know what to do with it. When you are posting to post because an expert told you that for social media success, you should be posting seven times a week between these times, and then you need to throw in a 6.2-second reel, not a 6.5-second but specifically a 6.2-second reel with trending audio that has less than 900 videos attached to them every other day.  How exhausting! 

Ok, there are many things wrong with this approach; first of all, the definition of “success” qualifies as a successful post to one business owner but most likely isn’t the same as “success” to another business owner.  You don’t know what the account owner's definition of success means. 

Consider this next part your hall pass/permission slip from a social media expert to do whatever the fuck you want on your social media feed. The rules for marketing your business is there are no rules.  Only want to connect with your community once a week or whenever it feels authentic to you to connect with them when you have something to say. Do that.  

You love making short-form videos and want to do that daily with voiceovers instead of trending audio great; you do you.

Here’s the thing, if you’re reading this, the chances are that you are a business owner who is running a business and is also operating as their business’s marketing director, content creator, and social media manager. This is your hall pass/permission slip to post in the hallways of social media, whatever feels good to you whenever you have the time to schedule and post to social media. 

I want you to know that your priority is to keep your business running. The secondary is to keep people in the know about your business. The minimum posting suggestion of 3 times a week helps your account to stay top of mind for people IF social media is your one marketing avenue because, at the time of this writing, the Instagram algorithm can have a delay of up to 72 hours for people in your community that are not interacting with your content regularly. 

My other recommendation is to become best friends with your social media analytics and frequently check in to see what content people enjoy and interact with. When you get in your analytics and see what and where your community is hanging out on social media and measure if that is similar to where you like to hang out and what you enjoy posting, it becomes easier to identify how often and where to post your content—removing this pressure to be creating more and more fresh content constantly.  Recycling content is totally ok- hardly anyone is going to even know.

Running a business is tough; please come back to this post when you need a hall pass/permission slip to do your digital marketing YOUR way, not necessarily an “experts” way who has an entire social team behind them.  You are a small business doing what you can marketing wise is better than doing nothing at all. 

The Only Social Media Algorithm Hack You Need Is Consistency

I don't know about you, but there's nothing I love more than when random people pop up in my DM's to share with me all these social media “hacks” that are guaranteed to bring you so many followers, traffic, and how to keep the algorithm happy.

Y'all, I don't care about social media algorithms, and you shouldn't either. I feel like all of this hyper-focused energy on trying to keep the algorithm happy has made us lose our joy for why we joined Instagram or any other social media platform in the first place.

On your gravestone, it is not going to read, “ Here lies XX, they had 100K followers and a viral Reel in 2022.”

 The only “hack” that I have found that brings in more leads and has the potential to triple sales is

C O N S I S T E N C Y.

 I believe that whoever is meant to find your business will find your business. Trying to fight artificial intelligence is a losing battle.  It seems like, as a collective, we've lost sight of why we're on social media because hardly anyone is being social. 

 When you implement consistency, consistency builds trust. Trust builds a relationship. Relationships create money transactions. 

Consistently posting, Consistently engaging with comments, Consistently finding and engaging with new people, and building a connection is the basis of all business.

Legitimate connection is at the heart of all of this. Let's bring fun back to Instagram, create content that excites you, not something that some guru with a team tells you works for them. 

What works for one account probably won't work for another. 

A little progress each day adds up to big results.

2021 Holiday Marketing Starts Now, in September

I know your Pumpkin Spice is barely cooled to a drinkable temperature, but if you haven't begun planning your holiday digital marketing strategy, you are missing out on valuable brand awareness times.

Your holiday marketing doesn't start with your first social media post on Black Friday. You want to make sure that you are capturing and keeping your audience's attention throughout September and October. Kicking into your holiday sales phase without the proper build-up and preparation could leave you falling flat by December 1.

Here is what you should be concentrating on from now until Halloween:

Brand Building: Concentrate on activities that showcase your brand, products, and messaging.

Increase Reach: Increasing your reach will be vital in adding new potential customers to go from scroll pause to purchase.

Entertain for a Scroll Stop: If you want to integrate yourself with potential new holiday customers, you need to give bite-size entertainment to get them to stop their scroll, pay attention and remember your name. Entertaining content does this best. 

Social Channel Zhuzhing: If you want significant results from your accounts, you will need your accounts in their best condition. Concentrate on Zhuzhing things like irrelevant hashtags, poor engagement rates, and images that don’t perform.

Reels: The key for September and October is to build brand awareness, and nothing builds this faster than reels. Make it a goal to post at least one reel a week from now until Halloween. 

Pins: If you are selling products to a female demographic it’s time to resuscitate your neglected Pinterest account by checking for dead links, and creating fresh pins.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by all of this, let me help you. Snag the Kickass Holiday Social Media Marketing Guide bundle or send me an email and let's get your business on track to Kickass this holiday marketing season. 

The Future Of Still Photos On Instagram

Do you like to see pictures?

I am constantly staying up to date on all things happening behind the scenes on social media platforms.

Yesterday, I watched an IGTV from the head of Instagram, and he said, “Instagram is no longer ‘just a photo-sharing app” and went on to explain how Instagram plans to reintroduce and promote entertainment, videos, reels, and stories.

This statement about taking the emphasis off images is one that I saw coming three miles away, but it still makes me so sad.

While I do love a good video and a crazy reel, I need the still images. And feel that your business needs the still photos.

There are still people out there who need to look at something that doesn’t move from their screen two seconds later. Some people still want to look at a stunning image, study it and read the words in the caption.

The still images in your feed help capture and convey the tone for the atmosphere and ambiance you are trying to achieve when the viewer signs up to work with you or walks into your store. The still images are an excellent way to convey your messaging to your people.

If you’ve been following or been around me for a while, you know that I believe in looking at your feed as a portfolio of your work and that the other neighborhoods of Instagram more of entertainment.

Reels should be looked at as a commercial, a hook to bring the reel viewers to your feed and capture them to follow and stay in touch with you.

Stories are a great place to give that behind-the-scenes footage and access to who you are as a person or team, not just a brand, because, let’s face it, we’re all nosy.

IGTV is for you to put videos of your expertise to listen or watch as we need.

While one of the head people of Instagram is saying that they are working on taking photos, I still believe that is where your business should keep its primary emphasis. With the introduction of Keywords and the SEO implementation on the platform, I feel still photos are not going out of style any time soon.

Trusting Your Marketing In Unforeseeable Times

Each week I chat with my accounts representative at Google about the ads accounts I manage.  For the past two months we have never seen search data as it has been registering.  The peaks and valleys in the search term charts have been pretty unbelievable.  It’s been so unpredictable that even my Google rep also isn’t sure how to comprehend it and scrambling to help.  People will be searching for things in mass one day and then the next day not searching at all.

When 2020 began I was prepared for sharing content for helping you market your business during the chaos that comes with digitally marketing in an election year. The chaos that is social media, not Google searching.  

If you have been noticing that your marketing has not been converting or a significant dip in website traffic, your business is not the only one.  It can be frustrating when your marketing is not converting but this does not mean you should stop all of your marketing efforts.

Marketing your business is a marathon that is based on know, like, and trust.  The way to ensure that you are helping potential clients or customers know, like, and trust you is to keep consistently posting to both social media channels and the blog on your website. 

Each day is unpredictable but remaining consistent in your marketing shows that your business is serious and in this for the long haul. We are going to be in this situation for the foreseeable future, it is time to brainstorm and modify how we do business.

Even Google is having to modify and figure out how to accompany the new patterns of our internet searching. 

Why You Want To Focus Your Marketing On Where The People Are

Imagine Ariel from the Little Mermaid Singing, “I want to be where the people are…”  That song right now has so much context as we are sheltering in our homes.  

As humans, in general, we are programmed to be around people not isolated in our homes, and as business owners, most of us earn our living through in-person human interactions. 

In the last few weeks, we have been asked to shelter in place, practice social distancing, and modify our business to survive in a digital, little or zero actual human contact world.  I can see companies working hard to adapt to the future of a digital world. However, it can be frustrating when you work so hard on crafting the perfect social media posts, complete with a scroll stopping photo, and the catchy caption only to look at your analytics and see that it hasn’t reached anyone. Let alone the intended party of whom you posted to get in front of.

You are not alone in this. In the last few weeks, social media engagement for most industries on Facebook and Instagram has been down. When I first began to notice the dip, I deep dove into client analytics to see where if any traffic was coming from. The first steady stream of conversion was from their Pinterest accounts.

If your business hasn’t leveraged Pinterest yet or even has a presence, you are missing out on crucial conversion right now.  The migration of time spent off of Facebook has been happening for a few years now, but people are also spending less time on Instagram these days. There are a plethora of psychological hypotheses on this one, which is a topic for another time.

The other digital migration that has happened is people have been downloading the Tik Tok app like crazy.  Tik Tok is a great way to escape and watch short, somewhat mindless entertainment. If your business can maintain it entertainingly’s brand on Tik Tok, this is absolutely the time to download the app, create some content, and, if it’s well-received, begin to build a presence there. 

The point of all of this is to keep an eye on your website back end analytics because that golden nugget of data will tell you where exactly your people are.  And where your people are showing up is also where your business needs to be continuously digitally showing up. 

Social Distancing & Your Business

After 9/11, I felt called to help my country. The next summer, I went to New York and worked at a foundation that helped kids who lost someone in the attacks. While this is not the same, I feel a similar calling to help my fellow business owners.

These current unfortunate circumstances have me feeling hopeful because while I have been saying it for years, there is no better time than the present to get to work on the virtual end of your business. We are entrepreneurs, adapting is one of our most powerful personal tools. We looked fear in the eye and started our business; this social distancing thing is yet another obstacle for use to pivot through.

It makes my heart so happy that so many businesses, while closed to the public and limiting their staff, have used their adaptive, creative entrepreneur mentality and started offering local 5-mile delivery or curbside online order pickup. As a personal example, I ordered potting soil from my local ACE Hardware online. I called the store to schedule a delivery because, on their social media, they had marketed that they will deliver your order to a specified mile radius.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my opinion on all of this is it will be the new way that small businesses will have to adapt to survive after we've flattened the curve and can go about our lives a little more freely. If anything is this just going to make that giant same-day delivery service located in Seattle more substantial. Your business will need to adapt now to flourish in the future.

Since I trust my gut on almost every decision that I make, I have decided to offer a few of my services at a significant discount. I've decided to provide this ensures more independent businesses come through on the other side and have a foundation started for what is to come.

Website SEO

Blog posts and back end enrich able SEO could help your business get seen right now. I am offering discounted rates on both of these services for businesses impacted by social distancing.  

Setting up a Virtual Store

I have been shouting from the rooftops for years to move parts of your business online. If you chose not to listen to that message and instead waited for a sign, this is your sign. Your product-based service can not survive today or in the future without having some products available for purchase online.

I am offering a discounted rate on loading an online store onto your Squarespace website or getting gift cards loaded on there for purchase. I also have experience setting up a Shopify store. 

Product Content Shoot

I get it you're not sure how to style your photos for an online store or social media. If your products can ship in a Flat Rate print postage from a home box, I will style and photograph them for you to use in your online store as well as in your social posts.  

I am offering 50% off of any of these packages until April 30th. For more information or to receive a quote, please contact me HERE.  

Maven and Muse Media is here to support you with whatever your digital needs are. We are going to get through this together. 

How Digital Marketing Changes In An Election Year

2020 is quickly approaching, and we are all most likely up to our knees for business planning for next year. One unique thing about next year is that it is also an election year, and election years can throw a wrench is business digital marketing campaigns. 

2020 will be my third election cycle as a digital marketing professional, and up until 2016, everything went pretty much as predicted. Candidates bash each other, supporters of said candidates share opinion pieces about the rival, yadda yadda. However, shortly after the New Hampshire primary in March of 2016, I watched the client’s customer bases leave Facebook with the droves leaving the night and day following when we learned who the nominees were. These people also did not log on or interact again on Facebook until well into 2017. 

At that point in 2016, it was just Facebook where the political advertising warfare was raging among the masses. Instagram was pretty much unaffected by the political advertising machine. Instagram, we were still seeing plenty of dog and latte posts with somewhat positive captions that the masses were even interacting with and again somewhat purchasing from businesses.  

The sales trend for purchasing non-essential products and booking services stayed statistically low, as is predicted during an election year. During election years, statistics show that consumers are more conscious of how they spend their money and are more apt to think twice before purchasing because the outlook financially for the next four years is uncertain.  

However, once Facebook jumping began, marketing plans were altered, and email marketing, SEO, and Pinterest became the focus. Which with these changes, businesses’ monthly marketing statistics stayed consistent as non-election years. People are not going to leave the internet because we live here now. People are, however, going to avoid places on the internet that suck for them. 

If Facebook and Instagram are the only marketing platforms that your business is focusing on, I’m sorry to tell you, but in 2020 they could let you down hard. Facebook has already said that they will not filter and will allow all kinds of political ads to be run. Since late September, I have already seen a dozen or more political all sorts of ads popping up on Instagram. This makes me believe that once the Iowa caucuses happen, Instagram will also become penetrated with ads, influencers, and those dogs and lattes photos we all love will be captioned with political comments. At which point, the cycle of leaving and logging off of social media until November 2020 will begin. 

With all that said, the key to running a successful digital marketing campaign during an election year is to be prepared for anything and focus on areas of directly connecting with customers via their inbox and their searches. What worked well for one month could very well not work the next month or as soon as the news cycle is updated. If this election is anything like 2016, we are all going to be opening up our apps to the wild world wide web together. 

Without The Likes, How Will I Know How My Social Media Post Is Performing?

The news of Instagram removing likes is mainly old news now. When the news first broke that the likes were going away, I surveyed my stories asking how people felt about it. Were business owners ecstatic that the like factor was going away, or were they upset that the likes would no longer be visible? To my surprise, it was a 50/50 split on how they were feeling.

The buzz around the likes was happening as I was sitting down with clients to discuss 2020 digital goals, and I kept getting asked the same two questions in different ways. Since you might have versions of the same issues, let’s discuss them now. 

“Without the likes, how will I know how my competition is doing?”

This is a loaded question because the likes on a social media post are not a direct correlation to how your competition is performing financially. I’ve said it before, and I will keep saying it, popular does not always pay the bills. I have known businesses whose accounts do not have the coveted 10k + following and are killing it in their bank accounts. And I also know businesses accounts with thousands of followers who are struggling to make ends meet. Tracking how your competition is doing based on the follower counts or likes on their social posts is irrelevant. You can never honestly know how your competition is doing or if they are financially your competition without seeing their profit and loss statements. From a marketing standpoint, stick to analyzing how your content is doing. Track your analytics and mindfully share more of the content your audience is telling you that they want from you. Your only actual competition should be striving to be better financially than where your business was last year at this time. 

“Without the likes, how will I know how my post is performing?”

The public might not be able to see your like count, but as the account owner, you still can while likes are one of the last things that should concern your marketing efforts I completely understand why they are essential to you. It feels good to know that people took the time to double tap on your post; however, to track if your marketing efforts are truly effective, you need to focus on conversion. The important statistics to you should be the conversions from social media to your website, sharing your post on their feed, or the conversion of someone reading and commenting or sending you either an email or direct message. Consider this, when you are out networking or selling your product in person, you are primarily marketing yourself. At these events, you can hand out all the business cards that you own, but the only way to be sure that someone ever really “sees” or “hears” you is if they convert that information and reach out to you on the contact information on your business card. 

Fighting an algorithm day in and day out is frustrating and exhausting. I completely understand that, however, the removal of post likes is not the end of the world. Likes have never paid your bills. Sure, clients/customers have liked your posts, but what made them a client/customer was clicking on your website to purchase a product or sending you a message to book your services. Look back at which post-converted them to click and be in direct contact with you, and keep doing more of that.  

Continue putting your best stuff out there, and remember that these are FREE platforms to use. We could all still be in a time where to be known or seen we would have to pay for an advertisement in a magazine. However, that’s a topic for another time.