Businesses and brands have picked up on the fact that social media is a perfect place for them to showcase their creativity and it also gives them a place to interact with their customers – both current and potential ones. They are always looking to grow that. If you have a business or a brand, how do you do this?
To start off, you could do an online search for something like “grow your audience on Instagram” and see what people are suggesting. There are also courses you could take geared toward doing this or you could hire companies to grow your audience.
Much like leading a horse to water, though, you are going to have to do the work yourself to get your audience to drink … or in this case, stick around to hear what you have to say on a consistent basis. We’re here to help you there – read on to learn more about how you can expand your existing audience on social media.
Have Contests
Having contests can be a great way to get people to interact with your social media accounts. Of course, it also depends on the prizes. You can tie in your brand with the prizes – like you might have a contest where the winner gets a phone, tablet, or laptop that has been customized with your brand on it.
There are a variety of ways that you can get them to engage with you and follow you
- Having a Caption Contest – Your followers can put their own captions on a photo and you pick the winner.
- Getting Them To Comment on A Post – They can comment and you randomly pick a winner
- Having a Trivia Contest – Ask them a trivia question and then you can randomly pick the winners from those who got it right.
- Having Them Submit Photos – Have them submit their own photos and pick the best one and award a prize.
You can really amp this up by promoting the contests on different social media platforms. You need to stick to the rules of the platforms. Also, you need to be honorable, otherwise you will have people bail on you and boycott your brand or company.
Put Images in Your Posts
Having visuals in your posts will be pleasing to your audience’s eyes. It’s a way to both draw them in and also break walls of text, too. There are a lot of ways that you can do this.
The reason for this is because there have been studies that show that posts that have these images tend to get a lot more views than ones that just have text in them. People also tend to share posts that have visuals in them.
- Make the Visuals Relevant to Your Brand or Business – You want to have things that make people remember your posts. There are so many different things that you can do, like creating your own characters that you can then animate – Gary Vaynerchuk did that for his line of NFTs, which gained him an even larger following.
- Be Sure That the Images Are Clear – Take a few minutes to go over them in a photo editing app where you can sharpen them and remove stray pixels to make it look professional.
- Try to Get Visuals With Faces in Them – People tend to connect more with the posts that have faces in them, since it gives it a human connection.
Use Video in Your Posts
There was a time when it wasn’t a good idea to include video with social media posts. That was because not everyone had download speeds that could handle video without reducing the playback speed to a slideshow. That is not the case anymore with many people having smartphones that have high speed internet that allows them to watch any video – especially if they connect to wi-fi.
So now it makes sense to have video in your posts. But there are things that you should do to ensure the best results. You should try to upload a video to the social media platform if you can, since people might not want to click a YouTube link. The video can also automatically play on a platform like Instagram, which will help your viewership numbers.
Be creative and post content that can showcase that to the people who are going to your platform. You can even issue calls to action to get them to interact with you. This will make them feel like they are being seen as individuals.
Interact With Them
Many times brands and businesses treat social media like it’s a one-way street. They just post their content and expect people to consume it and grow their following. This is usually not a successful strategy.
You need to make sure that your followers already feel appreciated. That means that you need to interact with them and show that they are not just passively seeing your content. You want it to be a back-and-forth between the content creators and those who follow it.
It’s important that you are very authentic with what you are doing. Have true conversations with them. Perhaps you could even do something like host a weekly Zoom call and have certain people participate. Show that they are hearing from the real you, not some intern who has taken over the account and is saying things in what they think your voice sounds like.
This will be in both what you do and what you hope for in the future. The people who currently follow you will appreciate being involved and people who may have been on the fence about what you do will feel good about deciding to go ahead and follow you.
Regularly Update Your Profile Page
Don’t treat this like your personal social media page and have the same profile picture that you have not changed for the past 10 years or so. This is another way for people to see that you have personality. So change things up on a regular basis.
This is important, since people look at these a lot, almost much as your content, which also needs to be on top of its game to keep your audience interested. There are a few elements that you need to know about your profile picture and your banner photo as well.
You should change them up roughly every month or so to show your important work and pay attention to the dimensions of the photo. It’s one thing to stretch out a picture or logo – it can wind up looking very pixelated. Make sure that you follow the suggestions for each site – they have their own photo dimensions.
If you do this, you should be able to get people to keep coming back for more or get a lot of new eyes each time you change your photo.
Don’t Use Each Platform Interchangeably
There are too many brands or businesses that blast the same message across different platforms. They think that a one-size-fits-all strategy is a good one. Ultimately, they will find themselves losing a lot of followers rather than gaining new ones.
This is because people use these different platforms for a wide variety of reasons. People who use Twitter largely use it to get breaking news or to post alerts about your business. It has a real sense of immediate urgency and you can use it to have time-sensitive calls to action.
When you use Facebook/Meta, you can take a longer approach and even display some of your writing skills to craft a longer narrative that can hook people and bring them in since you can go more in-depth when it comes to your story.
Use Humor in Your Posts
You want your content to be engaging, of course. That means that you should use humor at certain points. Yes, there are times that you need to be serious, but having copy that doesn’t at least try to make people chuckle every now and then can wind up being as dry as a very unseasoned chicken – and that can be VERY hard to swallow, trust us.
By being humorous, you reveal a very human side of you. If you are engaging, you should be able to draw people in and get them to read your pieces with interest. It adds flavor to your posts, and can make them quite delectable.
Of course, humor can be known as a double-edged sword, so you need to be careful about the line that you are dancing up to. You don’t want to offend potential followers. So err on the side of dad jokes, not celebrity roast jokes.
People who use social media on all platforms are familiar with hashtags. For the uninitiated, it means putting a ‘#” sign and then a word after it. So it would look like #hashtags when you post it. People can follow certain hashtags and it can help them find posts that use them. Baseball fans might look up #baseball, for example.
The thing with hashtags, though, is that some of them can get quite popular. It can be quite tempting to put ALL of them in a post, but that can wind up making your post become lost in a sea of flotsam. Instead, pick one popular tag and use it in a post. The others should be things that are relevant to your brand or business. That way, people who are interested in your niche should be able to find your posts.
While this might take some extra work, the results can be quite rewarding, since people who might not have seen your post otherwise will now. That can result in more followers than if you didn’t use hashtags.
Consider Using Tagging
Another popular thing in social media is to tag people. If you see something that you think someone else might like, then you can put their username in a reply so that they can see it. You can suggest that your followers tag other people that they think might like something that you wrote or posted.
This can help your engagement and if you can get a lot of people doing this on the posts that you make this suggestion, that could help bump up your follower count. It can also improve the engagement rate if they do it a lot in the comment sections of certain platforms, which is another metric that can help you overall.
You could really make a point of doing this on certain holidays, like if you do a Mother’s Day or Father’s Day post, for example. But don’t do it every single post, though. Otherwise, it can come across as being canned and they may ignore it.
Think long and hard about each platform. See what kind of people use each of them and come up with a unique strategy for that platform. Those potential followers will likely appreciate your taking the time to create something different on each one.
Expanding your audience on social media takes time and work – if you want to add people that interact with your, that is. Yes, it can be quite easy to buy followers to artificially inflate your follower count and make it look like you are much more popular than you really are. People are smart, though, and they can quickly figure out what you are doing and start to tune you out.
You can avoid doing that by following the above tips. It will show your potential audience how genuine you are, which they may reciprocate by following you. This is not a guarantee, though, since it can be hard to accurately figure out what is going on in each person’s mind.
Still, if you are your genuine, authentic self, then that will greatly improve the chances that people will follow you. Just keep doing that, then chances are good that you will be on the right track to having a lasting following that will communicate with you consistently for many years.
