Are you struggling to grow your social media audience?
You’re not alone. It’s one thing to create strong content that gets views, but it’s another to turn those views into loyal followers. With nearly 70% of adults in the U.S. now on social media, it’s important to have strong accounts to help grow your brand or business.
Wondering how to make a change in your audience count? Here are some practical tips, tricks, and advice to increase your social media following.
Identify Your Audience
The first step in growing your social media audience is to figure out who’s watching. Who are the people that would be interested in your brand and who are you targeting? What are their interests and issues and who are the other brands they’re following?
What need is that brand fulfilling for them and how can you use that information to serve you? You should also aim to learn specific things about them like age, socioeconomic status, profession and where they live. Having information like this is helpful in deducing what kind of content they will respond to.
This may feel like you’re being overly specific in identifying your audience. Don’t worry. You want to avoid casting a wide net with this research because it will then be too vague to actually help you grow.
Recognizing key traits about your potential audience and learning about the types of people who would be interested in your brand is the point here, so get specific.
Once you’ve figured out this piece of the puzzle, you can start working to make content that you know your audience will enjoy. If you find you have a mostly female follower contingent, make content targeted toward women.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have male followers or fans, it just means you’re likely to grow more quickly when you’re gearing content toward the people who are already searching for it.
Make Consistent Content
One of the biggest challenges in growing your social media platform is making content on a consistent basis. It’s easy to have an occasional post that hits hard with your followers and increases traffic. But if those moments are few and far between, you’re likely to stall out.
With so much content available on social media, you have to stay in front of people in order to get attention and remain relevant. This does not mean clogging their feed with post after post, but it does mean having curated, purposeful posts on either a daily or weekly basis.
Consistently posting will give your already existing audience more opportunity to share your posts, engage with you and tell their friends about that cool new thing they just read, watched or saw online.
The more regular your posts, the more your audience will expect consistent, strong content from your page. A lack of content or a huge chunk of time between posts signals to them you’ve stopped altogether or are taking a social media break.
Many times when this happens, people quickly forget about that brand and move on to follow another one that fulfills the same need you were. Keep in mind that posting just to post is not effective. Your content, however consistent it may be, still needs to be great!
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!
So you made a great video or took a fantastic photo. Now what? Simply creating the content won’t get you far when it comes to increasing the actual numbers of your audience. You need to get the most out of it, otherwise, what’s the point?
There’s a systematic approach you can take when posting in order to optimise and grow online. You’ll need to consider how and when your content is posted. You can easily research the analytics on both Facebook and Instagram to see when your followers are online the most.
By narrowing down the specific time of day your audience is paying attention, you’ve already insured more people are likely to see your post. Familiarize yourself with the algorithms of various social media platforms. For example, posting a video directly to Facebook as opposed to linking through YouTube, is likely to get a wider reach due to the algorithm.
Another way to optimize your post is to get the most out of it on your end. This could mean taking excerpts of a post and rolling them out over a few days, so you’re squeezing more out of already existing content.
This is especially valuable if you’re a writer or blogger. You can pull quotes or headlines and use them as stand-alone posts, put them over images or make memes out of them. This way you’re getting the more than a one-off post from the content you’ve spent time creating.
Turn Viewers into Followers
Just because a user watched your video or liked your post, doesn’t mean they’re committed to following your brand. So, how do you make them turn from a viewer into a follower? This is often a forgotten component.
Creators are simply excited they’ve received more views or likes than ever before and they forget that there is no guarantee they’ll reach those numbers again because a portion of those likes came from non-followers.
First, pick one platform and focus on audience conversion there. It’s too difficult to track and work on various outlets at once. Once you’ve selected the platform you’ll be studying, you want to watch for ratios.
How many people are viewing your post and how many new followers did it get? If a post received a fair number of views but grew your followers, that type of content is more valuable than a post that got massive views but didn’t turn that audience into permanent fans.
This is when you have take stock of the type of content that grew your audience count. What made it different than the posts that attracted more viewers but didn’t make them stick around? Take that useful information and infuse it into your next piece of content.
Your Followers Can Work for You
An overlooked and readily available tool is the notion that your already existing audience can actually help you. Think about it, users are constantly sharing posts and information with friends, family, and coworkers. So how do you create content that makes them want to do this?
Creating shareable content means asking yourself if this is something you would feel compelled to send to someone in your life. People share content for a variety of reasons; it could be funny, educational and informative, or it could even involve a contest or giveaway.
Regardless of your strategy, remember that the post has to fulfill a need of some sort, however big or small, in order for people to share. Each individual follower is connected to hundreds, if not thousands of other users. So, just a few shares could domino into a ton more followers.
Set Reasonable Goals
As you embark on the journey of growing your social media audience, it’s important to remain patient and realistic about how quickly that growth will happen. Hot tip; it won’t be overnight.
Cultivating a brand and a following takes time and work. Try setting a realistic goal for yourself. Maybe it’s to grow your follower count by 50 users per month. That can be done!
If you set lofty, unmeetable goals, you’ll just feel disappointed and burned out and it will likely make you retreat to the methods and tactics (or lack thereof) you were using before that weren’t working. You can create a weekly and monthly goal so you can easily track your growth.
If you see that perhaps you’ve set an unattainable goal, you can adjust it and work from there.
Make a Schedule
Creating a social media posting schedule can take a lot of the pressure off of wondering when and what you’ll post. At the end of each week, plug in what content you’ll be posting, to which platforms and at what time the post will go up.
There are several online tools that can post to your platforms for you once the information is put in so you’re not having to duplicate content or worry about being on your phone or computer at a certain time of day. Sites like Hootsuite and Sprout can do the job for you.
Creating a schedule will help you remain consistent with your content and keep you from stressing out during the week, scrambling for something to post so you don’t have too much downtime on your page.
Engage
This last tool may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many creators forget to engage with their followers. This goes both ways–engaging with followers who have liked or commented on posts and also liking and commenting on other creators posts.
This is a two-way street and the more you encourage and support other content creators, the more likely they are to reciprocate. When you receive comments on your page, respond to them. Thank the viewer for their positive feedback.
Don’t forget that people also use social media to connect and relate to others. Doing so with your audience and with other creators will make you more visible on other pages and keep your followers coming back.
Grow Your Social Media Audience Today!
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Now that you have some useful tips on how to grow your social media audience, why not get started right away?
Accumulating more followers will only help spread the word about your brand and increase business opportunities for you and your company. Save these tools so you can refer to them as you go to be sure you’re doing everything you can to expand your reach.
Check out our resources page for more tips, or if you have a question we haven’t answered yet, get in touch through our contact page.
