Social media is a fantastic way to promote your business. It’s free, you can target your posts and your audience reach is endless. Few other marketing mediums can make such claims but as any social media expert will tell you, there’s no point wasting time and energy sending out content if you don’t have an audience.
Increasing your followers should always be at the forefront of your mind when managing your social media accounts. Why? Because a large audience leads to increased brand recognition, improved customer loyalty, more opportunities to convert and of course, higher conversion rates.
On the flip side, a dwindling following will leave you trailing in the wake of your competitors and losing out on valuable marketing opportunities.
Whether you’re just starting out with your social media efforts or you’ve been trying for some time and are becoming frustrated with the lack of likes and follows, below are some great ways to increase your followers.
The first thing you need to identify is who your target audience is. Customer profiling provides you with the in-depth knowledge you need in order to attract a large following. Some of the more important factors to consider include:
Last year, 77% of adults bought goods or services online and 46% said that they rely on social media when making a buying decision. This means that by sending out content which is interesting and engaging, you could be tapping into a huge market.
Your customer profiling will really help you here because once you really understand who your audience is and what their interests are, you will know exactly how to market to them.
When posting on social media, remember that this isn’t the place for lengthy pieces of text. Social media is very visual and you typically only have seconds to attract someone’s attention and get them to stop scrolling through their news feed. Some great content ideas for your social media pages include:
Establishing connections and building relationships is one of the easiest ways to get more people following your social media pages. If you don’t have time to sit down and do this on a daily basis, try to at least do the bare minimum.
If someone responds to your post, like their comment or reply. If a follower sends you a message, try to respond to them because this could be someone who is thinking about using your product or service.
Just like you use keywords to attract visitors to your website, hashtags are crucial if you want to increase your exposure on social media. Twitter and Instagram are where hashtags are most commonly used so you should always try to use them when posting on these channels.
Hashtags help to bring more people to your pages because anyone searching for the word you’ve used will see your post. It is however important to stay on topic. You shouldn’t be commenting or posting on everything that’s trending – it must be relevant to your business.
Say you run an accountancy firm and Game of Thrones is trending, it’s not your place to comment on this. If the Autumn Statement or the self-assessment tax deadline is approaching however, this provides a perfect opportunity for you to increase your exposure through topics that a lot of people will be searching for and talking about.
One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make with their social media is posting too sporadically.
In order to attract followers in the first place, people need to see that your account is active and to retain followers, you need to provide your audience with interesting content on a regular basis.
There are many websites and tools which allow you to schedule posts in advance so you don’t have to worry about trying to remember to send out your posts every day. Some of the more popular scheduling websites include Hootsuite, Buffer, TweetDeck, SproutSocial, CrowdBooster and SocialOomph.
Running competitions on your social media pages is a fantastic way to grow your audience. Ask people to follow you or like or comment on one of your photos and in return, they will be in with a chance of winning a prize.
As well as increasing followers, this is a great way of extending your reach because every time someone likes or comments on your posts, their followers will see your content.
Again, there are a number of tools which allow you to quickly and easily run competitions on your social media sites including Hootsuite, Rafflecopter,Woobox, Pagemodo, ShortStack and Wishpond.
Tag other pages, users and locations in your posts. This increases the likelihood of other people seeing you, page owners engaging with you and it’s also a great way to gain followers if you’re attending an event.
Regularly visit your social media insights to find out what is and isn’t working for you. You can see the posts which have received the highest engagement levels and will therefore know to share this type of content more often.
Managing your social media channels is difficult and it can be hard to compete with larger brands who have teams of people supporting them and a big budget to play with. Stay committed to practicing the techniques mentioned above however and you will soon start seeing the benefits of your social media strategy.