How do businesses keep up with social media? Consistent quality posts and market research is a great place to start, but in this guide, we are going to address in-depth strategies to build and retain a social media following.
Post Consistently and Predictably
Finding a good balance between keeping your potential customers aware of you but not irritated by the frequency of posts is essential to optimizing your social media growth.
Determining what that means for your individual business is often going to involve a trial and error period followed by analytics-driven informed adjustments.
While it may seem daunting to have posts going out at a set time, tools like later.com an auto-publishing service can make the entire process automatic instead of worrying about timing their posts, busy business owners can focus on their business.
Post Unique Content For Each Platform
A mistake a lot of business owners make when advertising is repeating posts, or not putting enough effort into content that is going out, this is an extension of your brand and needs to be quality in order to lead to conversions or grow your audience.
Recycling content means people who are following you on more than one account are going to keep seeing the same posts and be significantly more likely to unsubscribe.
Be Conscious Of The Platform Demographics You Are Posting To
A good strategy is to choose a couple of platforms that you want to advertise on and create posts specifically for the trends, demographics, and/or culture of the platform.
Retention is just as important as new followers, making sure not to alienate current followers will help to mitigate potential clients unfollowing. Try to avoid excessive use of first-time exclusive deals to prevent previous clients from feeling like they are not valued as much as new customers.
Research and Utilize Trends and Hashtags
Research is important to understand why certain posts did better than others. A massive benefit of utilizing trends and hashtags is that it can get you in front of individuals who otherwise wouldn’t have seen your content which is the hardest part of growing a following.
While it may be tempting to use generic hashtags and copy them for posts, using market research and unique hashtags and verbiage will see significantly better results and conversions. Google has a keyword planner that breaks down effectiveness based on a large variety of demographics.
A great way to get an idea of the industry you are competing in is to check out your competitor’s campaigns, and marketing strategies. Focus on businesses that likely own more market share than your business.
Use Previous Posts to Determine the Most Effective Posts and Direction for your Business
Asking yourself about the efficacy of previous campaigns can lead to great insights into the kind of advertising culture that is effective and should be cultivated for your business.
Some good questions to ask yourself include:
- Did your audience giveaway posts justify their investment of time and money?
- What posts are causing you to lose/gain the most followers?
- Are Surveys effective for you?
- How often should I post?
Consider Paid Advertising Not Paid Followers
Often effective, it is always relative to the cost of the advertisements, if you are willing to pay and stay on top of the results, paid advertising can give you a significant boost to traffic, followers, and leads. A mistake some businesses make is they pay for followers, which actually hurts because your posts get extremely low interaction because your number of followers is inflated comparatively.
Follow Influencers/Collaborate
An easy way to build towards your branding and niche is to reach out to clients, family, friends, and affiliates in your industry. Additionally, this helps to keep an eye on trends as well. This is the groundwork for doing brand collaborations or sponsored content. By collaborating you share your audiences and in effect mutually benefit, for this reason often they are free, or inexpensive.
A people search engine can also be used to find influencers that you may be able to collaborate with. This is a great way to get your content in front of new eyes, as well as to build relationships with people who have a large following. When looking for influencers, be sure to consider their audience and the type of content they share. You may also want to reach out to them directly to see if they would be interested in working with you.
Hire Professional Representation
Running a business is a serious time commitment and often some of these steps will fall through the cracks, if you feel this is true for you, your best option may be to hire a professional digital marketing company so you can focus on your business and check with your representation about your goals and regularly check-in to make sure things are going smoothly.
