How to grow your social media following
1. Chose the right social platform
How can you grow a following if you aren’t using the correct social platform for your brand? You need to understand what each platform really does, who uses it, how people use it and determine whether it makes sense for your business to have a presence.
Your brand should also be on the platform(s) that your consumers are on. So, it is important to understand your target audience and what platforms they are primarily using.
For example, if your target audience were women between the age of 30-54 Facebook would be your ideal platform. Whereas if your audience were 16–25-year-olds Instagram would be the place for you.
Each individual platform has different properties. Let’s take a look at the top 3 largest social media platforms.
Over the past few years, Facebook has launched a variety of new services to allow their users to do more without having to leave for another site. These services include, Facebook Groups, live video streaming services, adding new publishers, and building a robust advertising platform.
Even if your target audience doesn’t use Facebook in a work capacity, they most likely use the platform for personal reasons. It is a great professional move to have a Facebook account with is active as the possible reach is massive!
Instagram has achieved over 1 billion monthly active users and some posts have been seeing results as high as 10x engagement compared to Facebook.
In August 2016, Instagram launched their Stories. Fast forward to 2019, over 500 million Instagram users are using stories every day. So yeah, the possible reach and engagement is pretty impressive.
Instagram have also launched shoppable tags in both stories and grid posts. With a business account, brands can now tag their products with links to their websites, allowing users to make purchased directly on the platform.
When Twitter launched in 2006, it gained popularity by introducing a 140-character limit to posts (now increased to 280). Twitter’s niche is becoming the first platform to embrace being truly in real-time.
Twitter has now grown to 330 million active monthly users and has become more and more popular for getting the most up-to-date news and information.
More recently, the platform has introduced advertising and the ability to upload videos and live stream.
2. Analyse your competitors
A vital part to growing your social media platform is knowing and understanding who your competitors are and what they are doing.
What platforms are they on? How often do they post? What type of content do they share? These are questions you need to know the answers to!
By analysing your competitors, you will discover opportunities to differentiate yourself as a brand and your target audience will be drawn to you over your competitors.
3. Be consistent
Consistency is key. The overall tone of your social media presence needs to match your established personality, values, and voice.
Your logo and bio should match and be constant across all platforms your brand is present on.
Users want to connect with your brand and sharing mixed or contrasting messages will confuse your consumers and more than likely cause them to unfollow.
4. Complete your profiles
You must have fully complete social media profiles to prove you are a legit brand. The profile is literally make or break for your brand as this is the first page views will see and first impressions are everything!
Make sure your bio, cover photo and feed is both accurate and up to date! It is no good having a dated image as your cover photo or an old logo.
Your brand is a reflection of not only you but the products you sell – you need to make a good first impression.
5. Utilize paid advertising and sponsored posts
General views are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. This is because the platforms are smart and want you to pay for advertising in order to achieve your social media status.
With that being said, social media advertising is one of the most cost effective ways to attract and engage with a new, targeted audience.
For each platform, there is a different method of advertising.
- Facebook advertising
Facebook advertising can he massively beneficial for your brand due to the vast number of people who use the platform and the robust targeting tools you have at your disposal.
Facebook has the ability to target specific factors beyond gender and location including life events, purchase behaviours and interests… scary right!
- Instagram advertising
There are several new features that Instagram has introduced for companies to take advantage of.
The explore tool is the key to Instagram. This is a completely customised and unique experience for users to discover people, brands or creators that may interest them.
This is based of posts you have interacted with, people you follow and the content you create. This is great to find potential competitors and see what content they produce.
It has been found that 72% of Instagram users made a buying decision based on something they saw on Instagram. So obviously the platform has come up with a way to make buying easier for them.
As previously mentioned, Instagram business users have the ability to produce sellable posts by tagging their product and creating a link to the purchase.