Many start-ups and small business founders know the key benefits of creating social media accounts and boosting their social media presence. They have seen the potential of social media to help grow their brand.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among others, are meant for communicating and networking. Most of the features are meant to allow businesses to connect with other users, clients, and potential clients. The feedback on social media is real-time and the communication process itself has become more convenient than E-mail or SMS.
After the creation of social media accounts with clear and strong profiles and pages, the next thing to do is grow the social media following.
Growing your social media following is another aspect of social media management that should be paid attention to. Take note that each social media account requires you to fill out some necessary information. Provide as many details as you can. Make sure you have a clear profile and cover photo, short description or bio, location, contact numbers, and a website link.
Here are a few more things you can also do to grow your social media following.
1. Integrate your social media accounts on your website, e-mail, and other marketing collaterals.
Make sure your social media accounts are visible on your website, e-mail newsletters, and signatures, and other offline marketing collaterals like posters, banners, and flyers.
On your website, you can put social shares or follow buttons either on the header or footer of the pages. If you have a blog, make sure to add social share buttons to each article. There are also social media plug-in and widgets that allow you to showcase social photos and videos, like your brand’s Instagram feed, on your website. If your website also allows users to log-in, you can put social media buttons they can directly use in signing up.
Putting your social media icons in your email newsletters and email signature is also a clever way of linking your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn pages.
In your printed collaterals, meanwhile, you can take advantage of QR codes that readers can scan to find out more about your brand’s social media accounts.
2. Cross-promote your social media accounts.
Your following on each social media account will most likely vary. Make sure your fans on Facebook know that they can follow you on Instagram and Twitter, too, and vice versa.
3. Publish quality content.
You can attract your followers with eye-catching visuals. Photos, graphics, and videos, apart from good storytelling, will not only grow your audience but will also generate engagement – likes, comments, shares.
4. Consider user-generated content.
Another way of increasing your followers on social media is publishing user-generated content (UGC) or photos and videos published by your customers. In hotels and restaurants business, for instance, you can repost Instagram photos of your guests enjoying a day at the beach or their mouthwatering food photos. Using UGC allows your brand to partner with your guests as extended brand ambassadors, too.
5. Connect with your social media network and join communities.
Use your profiles to invite your networks to like or follow your social media pages. There are social media features that allow you to do just that. You can also use your profiles or pages to join groups or communities that are related to your brand and make sure to participate in the groups’ discussions. Make your accounts visible through commenting on posts, tagging profiles and pages in posts, and constantly sharing relevant posts on these online communities.
6. Follow target clients and Like other pages.
Follow accounts of your target audience, too, and you will most likely get a follow back. Use your pages to like other pages that are relevant to your brand, too.
7. Use appropriate hashtags.
When you share photos and videos on your social pages, don’t forget to put your brand hashtags. Hashtags are still relevant, especially popular or most commonly used hashtags that are related to your brand. This will help put your content in the hashtag streams. Your potential clients and followers use hashtags as keywords in searching specific content, so making your account and contents visible increases your account’s chances of getting new followers.
8. Hold contests and give prizes that are related to your brand.
We all love winning prizes, don’t we? Hold social media contests on your pages and give out prizes that are related to your brand. You can ask people to comment on your posts to get a chance to win in a raffle, or you can ask them to post a photo and tag someone they want to share the prize with. You can also encourage them to share what they post to generate engagement and the photos with most likes win. Just be creative and the sky is the limit here. Don’t forget to greet and engage with the winners, as well as, those who joined in the contests but didn’t win.
9. Use humor.
Social media pages that use the power of humor get more followers, too. People like it when you’re funny. Entertaining social media content, memes for instance, that makes people laugh gets shared more. Your brand may be serious but it doesn’t mean your social media content has to be all the time. If humor works for others, it might work for your social media content strategy, too. That’s for you to find out.
10. Explore paid social media advertising.
You can go organic but you also have an option to boost your content to reach a wider audience through paid social media advertising. You can invest a practicable amount to promote your content, gain more exposure and audience, and eventually increase conversions.
Remember that getting followers doesn’t stop at increasing the numbers, it is also about engaging with and listening to your followers and audience. Cultivate a social media practice that encourages followers to comment, like, and share your content with their own networks.
Keep in mind, too, that growing your audience takes time, hard work, and consistency, but be assured that your effort will eventually pay off.
If you have more tips to add to this list, please feel free to do so in the comments below.
She is a social media manager for Pixels and Web. She is also a content specialist and a former content editor for an online news site. When she runs out of words, she runs ultra-marathon races for a cause. She loves Doctor Who and she believes she’s a daughter of Time and Space.