How to Increase Your Social Media Following
Top 6 Tips to Increase Your Social Media Following
Social media offers multiple ways to connect with your audience. As a tool, it has completely changed the way consumers engage with businesses. Brands have responded to this trend by investing resources into social media marketing, messaging applications, and private networks for enhanced customer experience.
Consumers, on the other hand, rely on social media platforms to not only interact with their favorite brands but also hold them accountable. Social media has become a vital customer service tool, leading brands to use artificial intelligence (AI) to shorten wait times, grade the urgency of messages, and help lower the costs of meeting customer expectations.
Building a brand presence requires earning attention from the right people at the right time. Sometimes all it takes to gain momentum is one viral post. But this is easier said than done. Odds are you will have to increase your social media following steadily and organically.
Here’s how you can do just that:
1. Build a Strong Brand Identity
Consumers want more than just a good product – they want to connect with the entire voice, message, and mission of a brand. With millions, if not billions, of businesses trying to make a name for themselves on social media, having a strong brand identity is necessary to differentiate your business from its competitors.
A well-crafted brand identity is instantly recognizable and memorable. It’s the essence of your brand. It communicates what you have to offer, what your values are, and the aesthetic of your brand. More importantly, it gives consumers an idea of what to feel when interacting with your brand.
Keep in mind that building a brand identity is a journey, not a single task. Define your brand’s unique value proposition, create a brand personality and pick colors that match your brand personality. Color is a crucial part of your brand identity as humans associate certain feelings with specific shades.
Furthermore, maintain a consistent brand tone of voice in all your posts and across all social media platforms.
2. Outline Your Target Audience
Pro-tip: “everyone” is not an audience.
Growing your social media following will require a significant investment of time and money. As such, you want to ensure you’re targeting and attracting the right audience.
Let’s say you have an SaaS product that helps companies manage file-sharing across multiple mobile devices—your target audience might look something like this:
Mid-level managers with 10 years of experience working in a specified field
- $100k+ salary
- Most likely men aged 35-50
- Spends downtime on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Biggest pain point – how manual and time-consuming their current file-sharing processes are.
Identifying your target audience is the foundation of your social media marketing strategy and will help you figure out which social media channels you should focus on, the type of content you should publish, and your brand’s tone of voice.
3. Choose the Right Social Media Channels to Gain Followers
Now, this is easy once you’ve identified your target audience. With so many social platforms, you have to be strategic in where you focus your efforts.
Once you know where your audience spends their time online, you can start making content that attracts followers. Find out what type of content they gravitate towards by utilizing social listening tools, pay attention to what they’re saying about your brand, and analyze what competitors in your niche are doing.
First, you’ll want to optimize your social media profiles so you can appeal to and engage your audience better. Write a concise bio on all platforms and include a brief discussion on what people can expect from you, create a branded hashtag to maximize visibility, and be sure to use the same logo and handles.
4. Invest in a Social Media Strategy
Social media has become a necessity for every brand. Creating a thriving social media presence is no easy feat. You need some structure. You need a social media strategy.
Having a social media strategy will help you tell a consistent, cohesive story about your brand and help you achieve your business goals. A social media strategy also ensures you have measures in place to identify what kind of posts, methods, and social networks are working for your business and the ones that are not.
5. Keep Up With the Trends
And create a few yourself.
If people are going to follow you, they expect content that excites and engages. Keeping up and selectively participating in trends is a great way to create share-worthy content. Additionally, while it can be risky to express a strong opinion about an issue, it can gain a lot of engagement and attract like-minded followers.
All in all, the point of social media is to be social. So, engage your followers with news, trends, data, and even humorous content. Utilize user-generated content to your advantage.
For instance, augmented reality applications allow consumers to virtually “try on” clothes and cosmetics before purchasing. You can share such posts on your social media profiles and create new ways to engage with your customers.
The biggest mistake you can make when it comes to social networking is using social media as a nonstop advertising medium. What you should do is start conversations and encourage genuine discussions.
6. Be Human
The last thing you want to be on your social media accounts is a faceless corporation with zero personality. While not every brand can be like Wendy’s on Twitter, don’t be afraid to crack jokes and engage followers like you would your friends.
Use social media to humanize your brand. Doing so will enhance brand awareness and help you personalize your product and service offerings in sync with your customers’ needs and expectations.
Connection is the new currency. Social media can power these connections, breed brand loyalty and drive bottom-line growth.
All you have to do is find an audience that resonates with your brand values and build the right brand persona. Showing the human side of your brand also means showing off the faces behind your brand.
Whether it’s introducing your social media management team or posting snapshots of your team “behind the scenes,” getting personal with your followers can significantly boost your brand appeal.
A Few Extra Tips to Get More Social Media Followers
Make use of social media analytics to understand the performance of your content and make better strategic choices. Do this to find out where and when your audience is actively engaged.
- Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.
- Partner with influencers and brand advocates to increase the reach of your brand.
- Join related industry groups to gain greater insights into how you can use social media to increase the reach of your brand.
- Seek out press features, interviews, and speaking opportunities to establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
- Incorporate customer service into your social media strategy so you can address the needs, concerns, and complaints of your customers.
Post consistently and with purpose. But there’s more to publishing frequency than how often you post. Make sure all your content adds value in some way.
Build and Increase Social Media Following with P3
The P3 Agency helps you understand, better, engage your audience, and measure performance. We offer web design in Clearwater, specializing in marketing, brand, and web development services. Contact us today for a free marketing assessment so we can get started.