5 Ways to Grow Your Social Media Following
- Buster Manston
- May 3, 2022
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 23, 2022
We take a look at some of the most effective ways to generate traffic to your page, build your followers and convert them into paying customers.
1) DELIVER RELEVANT CONTENT
The three pillars of any good social media page are:
Sharing great content from other brands that's relevant to your target audience.
Creating interesting, credible and engaging content yourself.
Posting regularly to keep up your engagement levels (your audience want to hear from you!)
It sounds simple, but you'd be surprised how often people lose sight of one of these three elements. If you start to neglect any one of them, you can easily lose the momentum you've previously managed to build up.
Let's break those elements down a little...
POSTING REGULARLY
Your social media following want to hear from you, so don't be afraid to reach out to them as often as you have credible content to offer them.
Your time can obviously play a big factor in how often you can post. It's a good idea to assess your businesses time resources before you start posting. You can decide how many hours a week you, or your company, have to devote to social media, and by doing so, you'll use that time more effectively.
Try and focus your time and energy by posting to fewer platforms. It's better to keep on top of one or two platforms consistently, rather than trying to spread yourself across multiple social media sites.
Pick the social platforms you've seen working for other brands like yours. Take note of how often they post and the type of content they send out. There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a formula you already know works well.
FINDING RELEVANT CONTENT
The type of content you offer to your audience is crucial. It can make the difference between gaining a like, or gaining a paying customer.
Simply generating likes or shares may help grow your page's following, but it won't help grow your business. Try and put yourself in the mindset of your potential customers.
Start by asking yourself these simple questions about your potential customers. Answering these questions will help your decide on the type of content to share with them:
How old are they?
Where do they live?
What are their interests?
Are they more likely to be male or female?
Take a moment to answer these questions and build a picture of your potential clients.
Once you have this information, finding content to share with them should be much easier. Try typing some of that information into Google, Google Trends, or the social media platforms you are using. You should find an abundance of videos and articles that will suit your audiences taste.
Before you post, make sure you write something about why you think this content is relevant to your audience. I'd also always recommend tagging and crediting whoever made the content originally.
A WORD OF ADVICE
After you've posted your content, try posting a link in the comments section to a relevant area on your website. Posting a link in the comments section, instead of the main body of text, will mean that the link doesn't affect the reach of your post.
CREATING FREE CONTENT
Creating content for your business can seem like a daunting task. Luckily, there are thousands of cheap, or free, online tools to help you succeed. Take a look at our recent blog 'The Best Free Design & Marketing Tools', to see some of our favourites.
Both free, and 3rd party, shared content can be broken down into three sections:
1) Educational Content - how to articles, educational style videos in your area of expertise.
2) Brand Story Telling - recent achievements, testimonials, customer success stories.
3) Entertainment Content - show them content that makes them feel something. Whether it makes them laugh, cry, or wow's them, just make sure the content links back to a product or service in your store.
TOP TIPS
Keep your content relevant to your page, don't stray off topic
Hubspot says that social media posts that contain video have 48% more views than those that don't, meaning creating video content is key to driving successful engagement.
Use impactful images that align with your company branding. Try and pick images that are clean, simple and fit in with the overall theme of your business.
2) PRACTICE GOOD SOCIAL KARMA
Gaining traction on social media can be and seem like a bit of a fruitless labour. It’s important to remember that building a following takes time and consistent content.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to make all this content yourself. Building relationships with other brands and businesses by sharing each other's content on social platforms is a good thing. Make sure you credit the relevant companies, or original content creators, when you post their work. Crediting others will come back to you in the future; think of it like social karma.
All of this will put you in good stead for building a following organically, but…there’s no getting around the algorithms!
3) PAY ATTENTION TO ALGORITHMIC TRENDS
So, what are algorithms? Algorithms are a set of mathematical rules that dictate where your post or advert will appear in search results and how much of your audience may see it.
Social media algorithms can change frequently, and there's no list of the algorithms in use at any one moment. What we can do is spot recent trends of success, and this helps us understand what is, and isn't, working.
One such trend of recent years has been the commitment to user-friendly content. This has encouraged businesses and content creators to deliver relevant and high-quality content to their audiences. Facebook in particular has championed this philosophy by prioritising local, family and friends related posts, rather than business posts. This now means that typically only 10% of your Facebook following will see your post.1
How do you ensure your posts are seen?
It's important to understand how each platform prioritises its content delivery. Below is a list of the major social platforms and how they rank their free content.
Facebook priority - relevant content, family, friends, local content
As we mentioned earlier, Facebook took a big step in 2018, changing their algorithm to focus more on personal connections and less on businesses. This doesn't mean that it's no longer possible for business to have an impact on the platform, but the direction they've taken means that Facebook ads may now be the best bet for businesses wanting an immediate impact.
Although you may now need to pay to engage with your target audience, Facebook ads allows you to focus in on the people most likely to interact with your content, which should lead to a return on any cost you initially incur.
Twitter priority - family, friends, post recency, comments
Twitter prioritises it's content similarly to Facebook but with a couple of unique differences.
Firstly, there is more dependency places on comments for Twitter. Twitter is a far less visual platform than Facebook, so it makes sense that they prioritise the furtherment of conversations instead of likes, for example.
The other way in which Twitter differs is that it places a huge importance on how recently a post was created. Newer posts will been seen by a greater number of people than older ones.
Instagram priority - relevant content, connection, engagement
Relevancy leads the way for instagram. The algorithms use image analysis and well as your use of hashtags to determine who your content relates to and then pushes it to that audience.
Your connections also play a key role. If your followers have similar interests and have interacted with similar posts before then it's more likely to reach them first.
LinkedIn - relevant content, connections, engagements
LinkedIn works a little differently to other platforms. Built specifically for B2B marketing, LinkedIn's focus is more so on networking than building followers.
By creating engaging and informative content you can quickly gain traction on LinkedIn. But always be aware, you're in a pool of specialists on LinkedIn, so you'll have to offer something they don't know in order to spark their interest.
4) CAPITALISE ON PAID ADVERTISING
Algorithms dictate everything from the percentage of your followers that see your post to how many messages a day you can post before you are virtually invisible online.
Essentially, if you want to be seen by your followers, then social platforms want businesses to pay for that privilege. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. Paying for targeted ads allows you to reach either reach a wider, or a very niche audience, depending on how you set your ad up. This can help you grow your email list, help you build your social following, or help you gain more visits to your website.
When setting your ad up, ask yourself what your what your end goal is. This will help you decide on the audiences and demographics you target. It's also a good idea to run a two or more shorter campaigns with different variables to test which is the most effective. When you've done that you'll have a better idea of which type of setup would provide the best return on investment for your paid advert.
5) CREATE A FUNNEL JOURNEY
Put simply, marketing funnels are a way of directing people towards an end goal. It’s important to always ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve before starting any marketing process. By doing this, you can gauge your success and see how you could improve.
Over the last few years Bad Batch have been using marketing funnels to increase email signups, increase social media following, sell products or services, and drive subscriptions for our clients. They are an effective strategy and can adapt to the resources and needs of the company.
Think of a marketing funnel as a plan that incorporates all the various facets of marketing that you’d normally use individually. By setting up a funnel strategy, you’re driving the users experience from a Facebook ad, to an email subscriber, to a website visitor, and finally, a paying customer.
If you'd like to know more about the process of building a marketing funnel, we recommend you check out this brilliant blog by SEMRUSH — how to build an effective content marketing funnel
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