Social media is a powerful tool for businesses, giving brands the opportunity to engage with their audience, answer customer queries and increase customer enquiries and purchases.
Therefore, businesses will want to grow their number of followers across the social media platforms actively posting to and interacting with.
With the right social media marketing in place, you can grow your followers with the relevant and engaged audience for your business. It is important to attract quality followers, not to just aim for quantity with your follower count.
Our blog post will look at how to gain followers with your target audience, including generating the right content ideas, audience engagement and making sure have professional and relevant business profiles across different social platforms.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Professional Business Profile
When a new audience visits your business profile or account it is important it represents your business how you wish, just the same as it would for any other advertising being created such as magazine advertising, your website or brochures.
The profile picture should use imagery, brand colours and logo where appropriate so that the branding is in line with the rest of the business. This should be the same branding intended to use across social media posts.
With the profile picture it is important to test it across different devices. For example for Facebook and LinkedIn, the wider profile image may be cropped when viewed on mobile. Across all devices ensure no important information gets cropped off. This could impact the view of new audiences before they even scroll to read your social media content.
Another important area of the business profile which can help to grow your followers is the bio information. We recommend to include a relevant website address and utilise including keywords which your potential customers and target market would search. The space in the bio can be limited, so it helps to be concise whilst using your brand voice to describe what your business does and how you can help.
Relevant Posts
In order to not only gain more followers on social media, but to keep your existing followers and to increase engagement, the post content being shared needs to be relevant both to the social media audience but also to the social media platform.
For the content to be relevant the social media strategy should aim to add value and keep followers interested in your social media presence. For example, this could be providing social media tips that are applicable to your industry.
Or sharing industry news with your business point of view included. By providing valuable content it will help to establish you as the expert in your field with your social media audience.
It is important to consider the social platforms posting to, for example Twitter users will expect quite frequent and topical posts. Whereas Instagram is a visual platform so requires creative content that will actively engage followers on this specific social media platform, also video content is impactful on Instagram as well as on your Facebook page and TikTok. Facebook posts and LinkedIn are useful social media channels to drive traffic to a blog on your website or YouTube videos.
Consistent Social Posts
Another important element is ensuring to post consistently on the social channels. It can be useful to have a social media calendar to use as part of the social media strategy. There are various social media management tools which can support with this depending on requirements.
A useful part of having a calendar is it helps to ensure your own strategy includes a range of content for your social channels, this will avoid too much repetition and include various topics which could add value and interest to your followers on each social platform.
If struggling for content ideas or how frequently to post on social media, it can help to look at other businesses in your industry to see what does and doesn’t work well for them to take learnings from.
As part of posting consistently, sharing posts at the best times on each social network can make a big difference to the size of audience which sees the posts. Whilst there are many articles on this with different advice, it actually does differ for each industry and business.
Looking at past posts to see if there is a recurring theme with the time/date posted and when most actively engaged will help to identify the best times, along with continued testing on social media of different dates and times and then analysing regularly could help.
Two Way Street
Whilst posting high quality content is essential to gain more social media followers, it is hugely beneficial as part of your digital marketing approach to make the time to make sure actively engaging with your existing followers, new followers and wider social media audience. On social media platforms typically a quick response is expected from businesses.
If negative comments are received for example about a customer order or a question about product launches, it is important to respond with a helpful answer and advice to their comment. This also applies for any direct messages received on your social account.
Community management is an impactful way to build brand awareness, brand advocates and attracting new followers to your social media. This includes engaging with your followers posts and accounts they interact with.
Another way to create content is to encourage user generated content, for example asking repeat customers to share them using the product they bought and tagging your business in the post. Shares and posts from relevant profiles can help increase your reach to a wider audience. This can then be shared from your social accounts, along with a comment on their original post thanking them on social media.
Relevant Hashtags
Another way to grow your social media followers across each social media channel is when creating content for your social media posts to include suitable hashtags. It is worth researching the best hashtags for that post so they are relevant to the topic at hand to get the most engagement from hashtags.
If the hashtags are too broad for example choosing only popular ones with a large audience on social media channels, can lead to your content getting lost among many others and not with the right audience, if the content is not actually relevant to that hashtag.
It is recommended to include broad hashtags as well as for example a particular hashtag which could be considered niche hashtags. Including a mixture of the two helps to reach a large audience, which is specifically interested in your content.
Advertising
A powerful tool as part of your social media marketing to increase followers with your target audience is Meta advertising across Facebook and Instagram. Whilst the above methods help social media accounts to grow organically, advertising is an impactful and effective way to directly target social media users relevant for your business.
Advertising on the social media giant can get your visual content and relevant content directly in front of your exact target audience based on specific factors, such as demographics and interests.
Advertising makes sense as a great method to grow your social media followers with the potential audience, to both help grow your social media followers and they could go on to be potential customers for your business.
We hope the above was helpful to provide tips and advice on how to grow your social media followers across various social media platforms. These are just some of the methods which can help to attract new followers and build on engagement and reach with your audience.
At 1PCS Creative we provide social media management which includes content creation, schedule posts, community management and monthly reporting. Please feel free to get in touch to discuss with one of our team how we can help your business.