5 ways to increase your social media followers in 2020

Mar 20

So, your business has decided to embrace social media. Naturally, we approve! You’ve set up all your social media platforms, added nice cover photos, created a few posts… but who is following you? Is anyone?

Another question, does it really matter? Well, the answer to that question is very much dependent on what you are trying to achieve. If you’ve joined the social media sphere to reach prospects and grow your business then it matters… a lot.

Why do I even need social media followers?

What can we say, when it comes to your audience on social… size matters! Whether you like it or not the social world will look at how many followers you have as a guide to how successful or legitimate your business is. There’s a reason they call it a vanity metric.

Not only that, but if you haven’t built an audience on your social media platforms, who are you talking to? It brings to mind the old adage, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

The more followers you have, the more people you can reach and, the more people you reach, the more opportunity you have to grow your business.

We know what you’re thinking… This is all well and good, but how can I get more followers? We’re glad you asked because, we just so happened to have put together 5 proven tips to help you get more social media followers.

#1 Advertise your social feeds on all your other online platforms

This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people don’t use their website and blog to make people aware that they have social channels.

For most businesses, their website is their most frequently visited and powerful marketing tool. Simple actions like ensuring that your contact page is updated with your social channels and adding follow and share buttons to your blog will really help your website visitors get quick and easy access to your social media.

Even your email footer is a great opportunity to get the word out that you want to get social. Having clickable links to your social platforms as part of your email footer is a great way of shouting about your social presence. You can even amend your footer to include a message that invites people to like and follow you. I know it may feel a bit cringy, but it does work.

#2 Understand your audience

This is crucial for all marketing, but it is especially important on social media. In order to understand your audience you need to be able to answer some important questions.

Who are your audience? A great way to figure this out is to build some marketing personas. Who are your ideal audience? What age, gender and profession do you want to target? Where are they based? Are you looking for leads locally or nationally? All these are really important questions, that once answered will help you focus your efforts.
What are your audience interested in? Does your audience want to be educated on your products/services? Do they want to see examples of your work? Do they want to be entertained? Get this down and you will be able to write content that not only encourages them to engage with you, but to share with their friends too.
What social platforms are your target audience hanging out on? If the majority of your audience are on LinkedIn, there’s no point trying to reach them on Instagram or TikTok. Social media isn’t a ‘if I build it, they will come’ kinda situation. You need to go where your people are, not try to lure them to where you would prefer them to be.

3# Feed them a diet of engaging content

Once you have people interested in your page you then have to ensure that they want to stay and engage with your posts. So how do you do that? Well, you give them consistent, interesting, entertaining and relevant content. Once you have taken the time to understand your audience it will be easier to provide them with content that matters to them.

The important thing to remember with social is that it is about what your audience wants to hear and not about what you want to say. Your audience isn’t interested in your Costa Coffee trip or what you ate for dinner last night. It isn’t a platform for you to talk at your audience, it is a platform for you to listen and engage with your audience.

4# Paid Promotions

Sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate. But paying for followers? It sounds old hat, right? In fact, it’s a bit of a social faux pas. And sure, building up a following of bots that don’t engage is literally a vanity metric.

That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about producing relevant and engaging content, getting it in front of the right people then turning them into lifelong organic followers of your social page.

So:

Create an awesome blog
Publish it on you social feed – let’s say Facebook
Set up a boosted campaign, selecting a relevant target audience and budget
Community manage any incoming comments, engage them back then invite them to follow your page.

That way you turn paid into owned followers. These people are already engaged and interested in your content. Best of all? They see future content you post organically.

5# Listen and Engage and Influence

via GIPHY

Again, it may seem obvious but you would be surprised at how many businesses leave people hanging on social media. Imagine if you tried to high-five someone and they didn’t high-five you back.

It would make you feel stupid, right? Well, that’s what it is like for someone who takes the time to comment on your social media posts and doesn’t get a response. No one likes egg on their face!

So what exactly do you need to do to make your social media a success? Long story short, you need to go from being a social spectator to a social contender. How do you do that? That’s easy, you:

Listen: Monitor and respond to all your prospect/customer comments. Find out what your competitors are talking about, what your customers are talking about, and create content relevant to them.
Engage: It’s important to find influential people in your field, engage with them and encourage them to engage with you. You can then reach out to them to feature on your blog which is a great way to expand your audience.

If you take the time to do this you will go from zero to hero and create an awesome social media presence for your business and, who doesn’t want to be awesome?

Need help getting your business’s message heard on social media? Check out what we do here.