Influencing Brand Awareness Through Social Media : Case: BEdesign Oy in Facebook and Instagram

Abstract

Consumers’ awareness of a brand is essential, as brand awareness is considered one of the main reasons that brand and its products are purchased. The use of social media has been regarded a great possibility for brands to increase global brand awareness, however, with continuously increasing competition for attention and fast commercializing social media, getting noticed has become challenging. The main purpose of this study was to use benchmarking to identify concrete actions that can be used to influence brand awareness in social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. Three Finnish interior brands were selected to be benchmarked based on their popularity in social media. Brand posts that were published by Balmuir, Pentik and Vallila Interior between October 2016 and March 2017 were collected and compared to identify concrete actions that can be used to influence brand exposure, customer engagement and electronic word-of-mouth. Based on findings, brand awareness cab be influenced by e.g. posting content (brand posts) regularly; encouraging number of #brandname mentions; utilizing hashtags strategically; co-operating with social influencers and encouraging electronic word-of mouth. However, it is difficult to estimate how much and how fast use of such actions could influence brand awareness.