How to grow your social following

I’ve seen so many business owners dedicate so much time to social media, and then get frustrated and disheartened when their follower numbers are low. By growing your following, with the right audience, you’ll grow the visibility of your company or product. Follow these tips to increase your following on social media.

Be where your customers are

You’re not going to get more followers if you are not in the same place as your customers, fact! Think about what social platform your customers are most likely to be on and then start there. I know that most of my clients are on Instagram, so most of my energy and posting happens there. I do have a presence on other social platforms, but these are secondary, Instagram is where it’s at for me.

Post consistently

You might start your social presence with so much energy and vigour; keen to be on all the social platforms, grow a massive following and sell loads of your product. However, if this doesn’t happen straight away, you might become disheartened and then stop posting quite so often. If it isn’t working, what’s the point? Well, the key to good social media engagement is consistently posting. Set yourself a goal; it might be to post every day, or once a week. Just make sure it’s manageable for you. And then stick to that goal. Keep showing up and posting consistently.

Engage with your audience

Your primary aim on social media shouldn’t necessarily be to get more followers (although that is nice!) but to have engaged followers. In order for them to be engaged they need to feel valued. That means you engaging with them. When someone takes the time to comment on your post, comment back, start tagging people, share other people’s stories about your product, do a post to thank your followers. This two-way engagement makes your audience feel valued, that will increase engagement, and ultimately increase your following.

Be human

People crave a connection with other people. Try to be you on your social postings, particularly if you’re a small business. People buy from people, so it’s important that your personality comes across in your postings.

Use those social dates

There seems to a date for everything now – Global recycling day, National carbonara day, Best friends day. Some of these may seem to have nothing to do with your business, but if you can think of a post, then using the days hashtags will increase your visibility and then hopefully increase your following. Sometimes, you have to think outside the box a little for content ideas – for global recycling day I might do a post about recycling old content.

Increasing your following is not a quick process, but following these tips will certainly help you to build the social audience you want.