How to Organically Grow Your Social Media Followers
Social media networks are continuing to grow with over 3.8 billion active social media users worldwide. Businesses can employ social media strategies to generate new business opportunities by connecting with brand advocates on these social media channels. There are a number of reasons why building an audience online is important. Yet, the struggle for many businesses is knowing where to start to increase their following. Here are a few steps to grow your social media followers organically.
Identify Your Audience
The first step to growing your social media followers is to know your target audience. Identifying key demographics and psychographics will allow you to gain followers who are most relevant to your business, and ultimately most likely to convert to paying customers.
Develop Your Content Strategy
The second step is to develop your content strategy, creating posts that are engaging (so that you attract followers) and shareable (so that you can reach your followers’ followers). When a user comes across your account and is scrolling through their feeds, you only have about two seconds to capture their attention and persuade them to engage with a post or give you a follow, according to Social Media Today. Using humor can create an environment of trust by breaking down walls between your brand and social media users, encouraging shares and follows. Posting educational infographics or informative tips can help establish thought leadership and prompt engagement. Pro tip: schedule out posts in advance to maintain consistency, and promote evergreen content, trending topics, and national days. And remember, adhere to the expectations on each social media platform and recognize that not all content is suitable for every platform. Continuously tweak your strategy based on how posts perform and how algorithms change.
Get Social!
Now that you have a clear framework for developing content that appeals to your target audience on social media, you will need to go one step further. Posting shareable content does not mean that it will be seen -- You’ll need to take action. Social media networks are meant for being...well, social! This is often the part where businesses fail to succeed, either because they do not have the time or resources, or because they do not understand the importance of this process. Here are a few ways to make use of the social structures and grow your followers.
Find Users to Follow
Businesses who are new to social media can select users to follow in hopes of forming a mutual connection and receiving a follow-back. When finding users to follow, it is helpful to think of these social platforms as maps of connected people and organizations that evolve over time. More technically, these social networks can be visualized as directed graphs of nodes and edges. The nodes represent individuals and organizations. The edges are the connections these nodes have formed, which can either be a one-way relationship where one user follows the other or a two-way relationship where both users follow each other. In order to increase your likelihood of a “follow-back,” businesses should seek out people who may already be familiar with their business. These people are likely to have strong ties with people who already follow you. For example, a loyal customer of a barbershop is likely to have told his best friend about his experience after getting a haircut. The barbershop should follow the friends of their most engaged followers. This is known as the strong triadic closure principle. If five of my friends follow a specific clothing brand and that brand invites me to like their page on Facebook, I am more likely to like that brand than another brand that none of my friends follow. Ultimately, this will help you build those links, as aforementioned, and grow your network.
Another suggestion for finding people to follow is to discover the overlap and “bridge” between communities. Let’s assume you are renting tuxedos to high schoolers in the area. It is likely that students from the same high school are connected to each other on social media sites, but may not be connected to students from a high school two towns over. However, there could be a few students who play on the same travel sports team that know each other and have formed friendships. If you can find users who link or “bridge” these otherwise disjoint groups and get them to follow you and share your content, you’ll be able to expand your influence. Build social capital and market share with this approach.
If you take the time to follow twenty to thirty users per day, you will be able to garner many new followers every week and month.
Nodes, B and C, are on either side of a local bridge and are the social gate-keepers between the two communities.
Engage with Others
Beyond following other people, you should engage with others who match the criteria of your target audience by liking and commenting on their posts. This will increase your exposure to potential customers and build a sense of community. On Instagram and Twitter, you can search by hashtag or location. For example, a restaurant based in New York City might search for accounts using the hashtag #NYCfoodie on Instagram. A local car dealership might search for accounts that have recently tagged a specific make or model. Leave an authentic comment on the top ten posts with an industry-specific hashtag or relevant location to get seen by people with interests and demographics applicable to your product or service. This idea was proposed by Gary Vaynerchuk and termed the $1.80 strategy. It is also important to make use of these hashtags in your own captions to increase your likelihood of being found.
Business pages can join Facebook and LinkedIn groups. These tight-knit communities offer businesses an opportunity to join existing conversations and establish brand awareness. Based on the structure of social networks, we know groups of people naturally tend to form and link together, so businesses that tap into these groups can quickly gain exposure amidst their target audience in a strategic way.
Don’t forget to engage with your existing followers as well. Not only does this help with retention, but their followers will also get notified and may check out your account. Engaging with your followers will help you foster stronger relationships. Every node or individual within a social network has a mix of strong and weak ties they are connected to. You have strong ties with the people you interact with the most. By engaging often with your followers, you build meaningful relationships and may convert a weak tie to a strong tie. Strong ties are more likely to share your posts and therefore, this is another effective and proven way of growing followers.
Network and Collaborate
Once you’ve established an initial following and have a creative content strategy that captures the essence of your brand, you can begin networking and collaborating with industry leaders. Leveraging your existing followers, you can form mutually rewarding partnerships with other individuals or organizations.
Intuitively, the social media accounts that already have some popularity are more likely to be brought up in conversation and continue to grow. The rich get richer rule shows that an account’s followers grow at a rate proportional to its current value, which ultimately means exponentially over time. For this reason, collaborating with other accounts who have a similar or greater number of followers than you can lead to major exposure and reach.
Consider giving another business a “shout out” in exchange for a reciprocated highlight (in the world of social media, this is referred to as “s4s”). When another individual or business recommends your social media profile your account is more likely to be found — plus testimonials, especially from a credible source, build trust.
These concepts show why brand ambassador programs can be so powerful. Sandcloud does a great job at partnering with customers who are willing to share their support of the brand in exchange for promotional codes or discounted merchandise.
One way to collaborate with others is by running a joint giveaway or contest. You’ll need to determine what the prize is and what the rules to enter are. One of our clients partnered with a local winery on Instagram, which resulted in 263 entries from followers tagging their friends and following both accounts. When you can gain exposure to another businesses' followers that also has an engaged, built-up, audience (while not in direct compeition), you will begin to see sizeable results.
Now you have the tools to build your online audience. Follow these steps and watch your followers grow.
Dunne Goodwin is a content-driven social media agency. Follow us on social media for digital marketing news and updates. If you enjoyed this blog, please share with friends and colleagues.