We’ve talked a lot about how social media is (for better or for worse) a necessary part of modern business growth, messaging, and marketing. Social media allows users to feel connected to your product or service, understand its purpose and usage, and spread the word about what exactly it is that you do.
Growing your social media might seem easy at first, then it can feel like it starts to stagnate. This is common, and we have a few tricks for optimizing engagement and continuing to grow your following.
1) Get Your Audience Engaged
Even if you have thousands of followers across the main platforms, if they aren’t engaged, your posts won’t spread. A common way to grow your audience is through shares and engagement. If someone likes or comments on your post, it shows up on other people’s news feeds who are connected to that person. It also tells the algorithm that you have something to say, and they’ll be more likely to make your posts more visible. Ask questions in the caption, engage with people’s comments, and like / repost other people’s posts.
2) It’s Not Just People Seeing Your Posts… They Have To Follow You
Growing your audience doesn’t just mean spreading your posts around the internet. You won’t get those numbers if people aren’t following your page or subscribing to your channel. If someone comes across your post, they might end up on the page itself. What they see there will determine if they want to follow you or not, and see your upcoming posts on their own newsfeed. This is why it’s important to have an aesthetically pleasing page on Instagram, short, snappy posts on Twitter, and information on Facebook that isn’t immediately off-putting. Think about someone’s click-through from a post to your page as your chance to make a good first impression. A streamlined Instagram page with visually appealing photos is a good start, and like we’ve said before, keeping your Twitter posts short and sweet with updates people care about will make people hit that follow button.
3) Host Contests and Giveaways
Remember how important engagement is? Hosting a contest or giveaway on any of your pages will boost this in a few ways. Caption contests will help with on-post engagement, but you can take this a step further and have one of the contest action items be a share or follow. Tagging a friend, subscribing to the channel, or following the page are all common and acceptable actions to ask your audience to do before being entered in the contest. A giveaway might look like a trial run of your services, or an intro meeting. It might look like a free session if you provide consulting, or a media kit if you offer marketing. It could be a partnership with another company or brand, or some of your product. Just make sure you’re getting something out of the deal too, and you get engagement and increase your following.
4) Increase Your Video Posts
It’s been proven that video garners the most engagement out of any form of media. If it’s in your wheelhouse, we can’t recommend this enough. YouTube has the highest conversion out of any of the platforms, but even shorter clips hosted on Instagram or Facebook will do wonders for your engagement, especially considering how many people have their newsfeeds on autoplay, which means the video plays automatically as they scroll. This means it’s more important to host the video itself on each platform, as opposed to having a separate link. If you don’t have the capabilities to put together short, engaging videos, hire this out. You can get a package deal from many outside marketing firms and see the results roll in.
5) Update Your Cover and Profile Photo
Changing your profile image and cover photo on each site keeps your content looking fresh, and at least on Facebook, this is an easy way to pop back into the newsfeed without actively posting. People will see you updated the image, which correlates directly to feelings of freshness and activity. Instagram has a small profile image, so keep this simple and bright. A logo works well here. Facebook is great for full images and banners with information, and Twitter can be used to highlight some of your recent work.
6) Hashtags Work… Use Them
Ok, so this isn’t for every platform. But on Instagram especially, using hashtags is a really good way to get discovered organically. We don’t recommend embedding them into the actual sentences of your captions (that’s very passe, sorry!), rather, separate them in the caption with some spacers, or add them in a comment. As much as people follow accounts, they also follow hashtags that interest them. If you create a post under your business account and then look at the discovery on it, you’ll be surprised to see that sometimes the majority of impressions come from people discovering you through a hashtag. Make sure they’re relevant, and choose between 8-15 to use for each post, all the way at the bottom of the caption.