A strong social media following can help to extend your brand’s reach and influence. Also, it will help you to generate leads, attract clients and drive conversions. And all these will translate to a healthy bottom line.
However, growing a strong social media following takes a considerable amount of work. Also, it doesn’t happen overnight. However, there are some tested and tried strategies, which you can use to grow your social media following.
In this article, we will discuss six strategies on how to grow your social media following and establishing a thriving online community. And with that said, let’s get to it.
Select the Right Social Media Platforms
There are hundreds of social media platforms available today. And, it will be almost impossible to maintain a strong presence on all these platforms. Consequently, establishing a strong following will be an impossible task.
So, you will first need to select a few platforms, where you can focus all your time, effort and money. The question is, how do you choose the platforms to concentrate on? Well, you simply need to find out where your target audience prefers to hang out.
And, you can identify these platforms by using various methods like surveying your clients and prospects, spying on your competitors, or using social listening tools, to identify where conversations in your niche are taking place.
With the information that you gather from the above methods, you can then choose around three platforms, where your target audience is frequenting. And this will be the first step toward building a robust presence and following.
Go Heavy on Visuals
Visual content performs extremely well on social media. According to Hubspot, social media posts with relevant images get up to 94% more views, compared to those without images. Furthermore, visual content is more likely to be shared on social media, compared to plain text.
So, if you are looking to boost your engagement and establish a strong following on social media, it will be advisable to include catchy, colorful, and visually-appealing graphics or images with every post that goes live.
And, you don’t need to be a professional graphics designer to come up with visually-appealing social media posts. You can simply use free graphic design tools such as Canva to come up with great social media graphics for your social media posts.
However, if your schedule is tight and you can’t manage to create time to design your own social media graphics, you can simply download ready-made social media graphics from platforms like ContentBASE.
Hold Contests
One of the easiest ways of getting social media users to engage with your content and follow your accounts is by holding contests. Besides helping to attract new followers, contests will also help to keep your current followers engaged, meaning your following won’t stagnate.
You should consider experimenting with different types of contests and then focus on the ones that deliver the best results. Some of the contests that you can host include commenting to win, best caption wins, best photo contest, trivia contest, location contest, and fill-in-the-blank contest.
Ensure you promote your contests across different platforms and channels, to boost their reach. Also, the prize you give should be related to the products or services that you offer.
Partner With Micro Influencers
Partnering with micro influencers is yet another effective method of extending your reach on social media and building a strong, authentic following. Micro influencers are influencers with less than 50,000 followers.
The main benefits of partnering with influencers as opposed to macro influencers are that their rates are affordable and there’s higher genuine engagement. Furthermore, micro influencers tend to have closer and stronger relationships with their followers. So, if they recommend you on social media, a considerable percentage of their followers will also follow you.
However, it’s important to mention that your success with this arrangement will depend on the individual you choose to partner with. Therefore, you need to conduct thorough research and proper due diligence, to ensure you land the right influencer.
Some of the parameters you can use to narrow down your candidate pool and hire the right influencer include target audience, level of engagement, reach and quality of their content.
Follow Other Relevant Brands
Another method that can help to expand your reach on social media and get more followers is by following and engaging other relevant brands. For this strategy, you will need to identify other brands with similar audiences as you.
From there, you should then begin sharing their posts or replying to comments on their posts. Doing so will help to boost your brand’s visibility and consequently increase your follower count. But, you should stay away from following or engaging with your competitors’ content.
In Summary
Implementing the tips we’ve discussed here will lay the foundation for growing your social media following. And, by sticking with them and maintaining consistency, you will eventually see your following grow across your different social media platforms.
