Five Simple Tips to Quickly Boost your Business’ Social Media Following
In this day and age, being on some form of social media is almost a necessity for brands and businesses. Customers expect the companies they use to be active on these platforms and will often use your social following as a gauge of how trustworthy the business is.
Social media is also an excellent way to start creating a brand and offers opportunities to build a tribe of loyal fans and, hopefully, repeat customers.
The benefits of social media are easy to see but gaining a following can be difficult. Here are some simple-to-use tips that can give a boost to your social media today.
- Have a Plan and a Goal
Before you go out and start plastering content all over social media, you need to have a clear goal for that content. Of course, building your brand is an overarching goal but you need to get more specific.
Drilling down into the specifics of why you are posting on a specific platform will help you to select the right platform and will make it much easier to decide what kinds of things to post.
Having a goal for your social media campaigns also makes it measurable so you can see whether or not it is working. You’ll then be able to change your approach or cut a certain platform from your plans altogether to avoid wasting time.
A simple example of a goal could be to increase engagement on your Facebook page by 10% this month. With this goal in mind, you can go out and plan content that drives conversation and engagement.
Another goal may be to pre-sell a book inside your Facebook group before the launch date in 2 months. To achieve this goal, posting helpful content related to the book’s topic and teasing the book in the Facebook group could be a good plan.
- Be Consistent
Almost every single social media platform out there rewards consistency when it comes to posting. Being in front of your audience more often means higher engagement levels, which usually leads to the algorithm giving you a bump in visibility.
Consistency is also a great tool for building trust with people since they can see a business that is active and available.
The most successful brands on social media will have an editorial calendar they stick to. The calendar will help you to plan future posts and it keeps you consistent.
The fact you’ll be planning content for the future should also give you more time to create high-quality pieces, which is also key. Even though you need consistent quantity, quality shouldn’t be sacrificed.
You can use automation tools like Tailwind to create a calendar and schedule your posts.
- Look Like a Brand
You need to be consistent with the way your business looks across all of your social media platforms. This will help create the idea of a successful, big brand inside the minds of your audience.
Looking like a brand means having your company logo displayed along with your chosen color scheme. You’ll also need to design a banner for your profiles that represents your brand. Going a step further, putting logos on your images and making your fit with your brand’s aesthetic are more good ways to build on the idea.
If you haven’t created logos or banners before, you don’t need to run out and spend a fortune to do it. A great logo can be made using free online tools like logocreator.io and you could use simple design apps like Canva for creating banners or putting logos or branding your images.
- Don’t Sound Like a Brand
Looking like a big, successful brand can be an advantage but sounding like a typical corporate brand most certainly is not.
Adding a human touch to your social posts enables your audience to connect with your brand and makes it appear more relatable. At the end of the day people buy from people so coming across as a real human being is a must.
This doesn’t mean you act unprofessionally but you shouldn’t be afraid to post lighthearted content and joke around with your followers. It is often refreshing to see brands sharing a laugh on these platforms and will make you shine through the crowd of robotic corporate entities.
- Think About Paid Social Media
One thing you should not be doing is buying social media followers directly. Services that offer you a guaranteed number of followers for a fee aren’t a good idea since you’ll end up with fake followers or ones that have no interest in your products.
However, paying to advertise your content via integrated adverts on social platforms can be one of the quickest ways to boost your visibility and following.
Nowadays, organic visibility can be extremely low on social media for new pages and profiles. You can get around this by paying to advertise content. You can advertise anything including posts, giveaways, blog articles, e-books, and more.
You can even get super-targeted with your adverts thanks to built-in targeting options as well as using more technical approaches such as Facebook’s pixel to advertise to audiences that have already had contact with your brand.
For example, these kinds of pixels give you the ability to advertise to a set of people that have already visited a specific page on your website or taken a specific action.
Options like the above are excellent ways to boost your followings but you need to make sure you have a clear plan for making the traffic from these adverts profitable. Otherwise, you can end up sinking a ton of cash into building a huge following that you can’t monetize.
Guest Post: Author Marion Hart has worked in the field of marketing, with a focus on social media, for several years. When she’s not working at the agency level she enjoys writing. Her content covers a wide range from short stories to actionable articles. Outside of work she’s into travel, cuisine and the arts.