Measuring Brand Awareness on Social Media: A Comprehensive Guide

Effective marketers understand that engaging, crisp and visually appealing content is key to garnering attention, awareness and engagement on social channels. Measuring brand awareness is another story — it can be challenging to quantify the impact your creative content has on your overall strategy. 

In this article, we explore: 

• What is brand awareness?
• Why is brand awareness important on social media platforms?
• Which KPIs and metrics to track to measure brand awareness. 
• How to set goals to measure brand awareness. 
• How to choose the right creative content. 
• Tracking and analyzing the performance of brand awareness.

What Is Brand Awareness?

At its most basic form, brand awareness is exactly what it sounds like — how aware users are of your brand. More specifically, it delves into things like: 

• How engaged are users in your target demographic? 
• How much share of voice does your brand hold in its industry? 
• What level of brand awareness does your audience have? 

When we look at brand awareness strategy from a content marketing perspective, there are three main stages to consider:

• Brand recall and awareness: Users know who your brand is and what they do.
• Brand recognition: This is where consumers like and prefer your brand.
• Brand dominance: This describes how dominant your brand is in the industry, or for content marketing, how dominant your brand is in the channels you occupy. 

For most brands, awareness is an ongoing part of their content marketing strategy. Whether you shift to new markets and global brand awareness becomes a focal point, or you target a new demographic, social media is essential to reach these groups. Without the power of channels like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, brands risk missing out on a large, captive audience. 

Why Is Brand Awareness Important on Social Media Platforms?

Brand awareness on social media platforms is paramount for any brand seeking visibility, reaching new demographics and building its audience. Even for B2B brands, word-of-mouth is often not enough — social media presents an opportunity for them to continue to build their brand identity and reach decision-makers without cold-calling or other traditional means. 

Setting Goals For Measuring Brand Awareness

The most important way to measure the impact of your creative content on brand awareness goals is to set KPIs based on your social media analysis — for brand awareness, some of the most basic KPIs you might focus on are: 

• Followers: This KPI indicates you’re gaining or losing followers based on your content efforts. The right social media reporting tool can even pull in which posts led to new followers or caused you to lose old followers. 
• Engagement rate: Engagement rates serve as an excellent indicator of the level of engagement from your existing and new followers. If you see your increase in followers has become stagnant — or worse, dropping in engagement rate, this can indicate that your typical content doesn’t resonate with this demographic. But don’t panic — this is a great opportunity to look at other visual content ideas. Conversely, if engagement rates increase, this can be seen as a success since you’re not only reaching more users but engaging them along the way. 
• Shares, reposts, retweets and more: While shares, reposts, retweets, etc. also fall under engagement, it’s a great KPI to look at to measure brand awareness. This means that users aren’t only aware of your brand but are sharing your content with others. 
• Reach: Reach is a useful measurement of creativity that can help determine how successful your brand awareness efforts are — since not every user your content reaches will follow you, this is a great metric to communicate to your team how impactful visual content is to build brand awareness. 
• Traffic: This measures how many people come to your social profiles or website from other social channels. 

KPIs and Metrics To Measure Brand Awareness 

KPIs play a crucial role in measuring brand value. While metrics like reach, followers and engagement are commonly used, there are additional brand awareness metrics that can provide valuable insights for your strategy and effectively communicate the impact of your social efforts on achieving brand objectives and goals to your team.

Custom reports let you take this a step further and only concentrate on the metrics that matter most — the right analytics tool can help you create beautiful reports that cut through the noise that data can often present and let your team better measure brand value.

Entertainment score

Entertainment Score is a metric specifically created by Dash Hudson that measures how entertaining your TikTok content is. Social entertainment is on the rise — entertainment is one of the main reasons users flock to sites like TikTok. Measuring Entertainment Score lets you see how users really feel about your content beyond conversions, site traffic or other brand awareness metrics. 

Effectiveness rate

Effectiveness rate is available for Facebook and Instagram. This metric offers a more robust understanding for brands of how effective your content is. This metric uses reach instead of followers, so marketers know how their content resonates with everyone who interacts with their posts, not just their followers. 

Engagement metrics (social shares, likes, comments)

Engagement metrics provide users with insights into how engaged their audience is with their content. Since social feeds often encourage scrolling, any form of interaction, such as sharing, reposting, commenting, or liking, indicates interest from your audience.

Social listening

Marketers can gain a lot of insight from listening, and social listening tools let you pull in what users say about your brand. Dash Hudson takes this a step further by using sentiment analysis to measure whether the comment had a positive, neutral or negative sentiment. 

Share of voice on social media

Share of voice lets brands measure how much space they occupy on social media relative to competitors. This is a great metric to compare your brand’s performance to competitors. 

UGC

UGC, or user-generated content, is the earned content your brand receives. A great UGC tool can measure and surface the best content from users. 

Tags and mentions 

Tags and mentions are other great metrics for brands to measure to determine how their content resonates with others. The more shares and mentions, the more engaged users are, and the more people are aware of your brand. 

Reach and impressions

Reach is a valuable metric that reveals the number of people your content reaches, extending beyond your existing followers. Impressions, on the other hand, indicate how many times your content has been displayed, allowing marketers to assess the performance of their brand and content beyond their follower base. 

Branded search volume and traffic

Branded search terms are exactly what they sound like — terms that use your brand name. For a beauty brand, this might be something like ‘best rare beauty blush’ — for context, this term has a volume of 390. Using this method makes it easy for brands to measure how much traffic they receive from branded terms and whether they should incorporate more branded terms in their social and on-site content.  

Choose the Right Creative Content

Choosing the right creative content is imperative to an effective content marketing strategy and increasing brand awareness. As we mentioned earlier, social media is predominantly used for entertainment purposes. Since users are overwhelmingly heading to social media to be entertained, it’s essential to choose the right creative mediums that will effectively resonate with your target audience. 

While there are many ways to determine the best creative content for your brand, the demographic you target plays a significant role in determining the best fit for your brand. 

Explore these diverse content types to engage with different audience segments:

• Gen Z: YouTube, Reels and TikTok content are great places to invest your efforts to reach Gen Z. This group tends to use these channels multiple times a day to discover new online trends and entertainment.   
• Millennials: Instagram content — particularly Instagram Reels, are popular with millennials, with 28% of people aged 18-24 and 18% aged 35-44 using the platform. Brands should focus on creating static feed posts and exploring emerging Reels trends to reach this group.  
• Generation X: The most popular social channels for Gen X are YouTube and Facebook. 70% of Gen X reports using YouTube, while 76% report using Facebook — brands should hone their Facebook content, create Shorts and engage groups to reach this demographic. 

Tracking, Analyzing and Reporting Performance of Brand Awareness

Brands need to establish a tracking or measurement workflow to evaluate the impact of their marketing efforts and effectively communicate with their broader marketing and brand teams.

However, these reports aren’t only to measure the impact of your content — they’re also great for your team to analyze performance, identify trends and collect insights for your strategy so you can pivot if needed. 

Brands can use competitive insights and benchmarking to see how they stack up against competitors, while the best social media analytics tools will let brands track the metrics that matter most for their unique goals — these tools help to cut out the noise and focus on at-a-glance or deeper insights for your specific KPIs. 

Social Media Analytics Tools for Measuring Brand Awareness

Are you looking for a way to quantify all the stunning, creative visuals your team creates? Dash Hudson does the hard work for you.  

Brands can create custom reports to pull in the metrics specific to a particular campaign or goal — like brand awareness. Dash Hudson’s Social Media Reporting Dashboards also detail which content and influencer partnerships drive the most ROI, platform-specific insights, and even let marketers customize their data and easily share it with their wider team. 

Once you have successfully enhanced brand awareness, how can you leverage this to shape your strategy? Brands can gain valuable insights into audience sentiment and opinions through Dash Hudson's AI-Powered Social Listening. This powerful tool tracks user conversations about your brand, providing an understanding of what they say and how they truly feel about it. These insights can inform and refine your strategy moving forward.

FAQs

How can creativity be measured?

While it’s challenging to measure creativity in itself, there are a few metrics that help brands that are wondering how to measure creativity. Some KPIs brands can look at to measure the effectiveness of their creative content are:  

• Effectiveness rate. 
• Engagement rate. 
• Reach. 
• Entertainment score. 

What are the three ways to measure brand awareness?

There are several methods to gauge brand awareness, but let's focus on three primary approaches that brands can employ to monitor their awareness levels: 

• Traffic: An increase in traffic is a simple metric for brands to measure brand awareness, as this indicates more users are finding your page. Take this a step further and dig into analytics that measures unique site visits. 
• Engagement rate: Engagement rate lets brands measure how engaged their existing followers are — if you continue to grow followers, brands should watch this KPI to ensure they increase awareness while keeping users interested. 
• Followers: While there are more robust KPIs to dive into, at a basic level, new followers are a great way for brands to measure whether or not they are increasing awareness and reaching new users. 

What are the three elements of measuring creativity?

Three elements or stages of brand awareness can aid creative measurement. These include: 

• Brand recall: This is about how easily users can recall your brand — for example, when prompted about the most popular makeup brands, is yours mentioned? Many factors contribute to brand recall, like usage levels, overall awareness, and brand loyalty. 
• Brand recognition: Similar to the recall stage, brand recognition is when users know your brand when asked or can identify products from the brand without a name on the label. 
• Top-of-mind awareness: This is the dream for many brands when their brand is ubiquitous with a product, industry, or vibe. One of the most common examples of top-of-mind awareness is Kleenex — many people ask for a Kleenex before they ask for a tissue.