Social Media has become a necessary evil for new brands and businesses. It’s essential for everything from email signups to brand awareness to conversions.
With over 53% of the world's population on social media, your business must have an effective social media strategy that helps you reach your intended audience.
When it comes to learning how to grow your social media accounts to increase your brand awareness, it takes lots of research, a good strategy, and a handful of great ideas.
But there are a few things you must understand first before we get into ten ways to help you grow your socials.
Organic Reach Is Being Limited
When learning how to grow your socials, you first must understand that organic reach is being limited across the board on all social media platforms, and the two primary reasons this is happening.
In January 2018, Facebook's Head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri was quoted saying they were going to start "shifting the rankings to make News Feed more about connecting with people and less about consuming media in isolation."
As a result, marketing content was forced to take a backseat to content posted by your friends and family. This change in Facebook’s rankings and algorithm forced businesses to start “boosting” their content in order for it to be seen.
The second reason is pretty simple - everyone is online now.
More and more content is being created and shared every day. In fact, 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram per day.
With so much content being created, shared, and advertised, it’s easy to get lost if your content isn’t high-quality or unique.
These two points are essential to remember when learning how to grow your social media.
If you already have a social media plan and just need tips for growing your socials, click here to skip!
Developing a Social Media Plan
Before you start creating content, researching hashtags, or driving traffic to your landing pages, you must first develop and social media plan and strategy to help you grow your socials.
When starting with your social media plan outline, it’s best to make SMART Goals. And no, we’re not talking about high intelligence goals - we mean Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based.
SMART Goals are a tool you can use to guarantee that the goals you are setting are achievable within the timeframe you’re considering. For example, set up an Instagram account to engage with the 25-34 audience and see a 10% increase in website conversions within three months.
Once you have your goals figured out, here are the next steps…
Learn Everything You Can About Your Audience
Establish Your Most Important Metrics and KPIs
Research Your Competitor’s Profiles
Establish Your Brand Voice, Tone, and Style
Create a Calendar of Events, Launches, Holidays, Etc.
Determine an Ad Budget
Research and Create Engaging Social Content
Post and Analyze Your Results
Adjust Your Marketing Strategy As Necessary
Learn Everything You Can About Your Audience
Before you can figure out your social media strategy, you first have to determine which market or audience you want to be selling to. Whether it's a physical product or a service, researching your market should always be your first step.
You will need to understand their buying behavior, the platforms they use most frequently, the type of content they prefer to see, and what their buyer personas are.
Establish Your Most Important Metrics and KPIs
The metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you will track depend on your goals.
If your goal is to grow your brand awareness, you won’t necessarily need to track comments or website click-through-rate.
Research Your Competitor’s Profiles
Once you’ve determined your audience and metrics, the next step is to research your competitors thoroughly.
Researching your competitors not only lets you determine their strengths and weaknesses, but it can also help you assess what can make you different and what is going on in your market.
The biggest questions you want to answer when researching your competitors are…
What can I bring to the table that they don’t?
What type of content do they create?
Which posts perform better or worse than others?
Establish Your Brand Voice, Tone, and Style
Unlike concrete items like buyer demographics and most used platforms, your brand voice, who your audience hears talking, and tone, how you write can be entirely up to you.
However, always keep in mind who your target audience is. If your product/service and audience is more casual, going for a formal and educated tone may not be in your best interest.
You will also need to create a branding guide, or style guide, to ensure consistency throughout your socials.
One of the most fundamental reports any business should have is a brand style guide, otherwise known as a branding guide. Not only do they ensure brand consistency throughout all channels and campaigns, but they are an excellent way to see your brand come to life.
To learn how to create a style guide, you can visit our blog, here.
Create a Calendar of Events, Launches, Holidays, Etc.
You will now need to figure out all the dates for upcoming product/service launches, discount days, grand openings, and more. Anything that will happen in your business should also be discussed on social media.
Remember, people buy from people, not brands (unless you Nike or Trader Joe's, of course).
Set aside days to talk about your staff, story, and who you are. Find fun holidays that might relate to your business, such as national cupcake day, national secretary day, or even national dog day.
If it’s something you can create content around, you can create a content calendar.
A content calendar is essentially a schedule of when and, in this case, which social platforms you plan on posting on your content. It will help you get ahead of the content creation process by batching your content in 1, 2, 3, or 4-week intervals. This will help you can focus the rest of your time on other responsibilities, such as customer service, email marketing, or production.
Determine an Ad Budget
As we mentioned above, organic reach is increasingly limited for businesses online. It’s almost necessary now to have some sort of ad or boosted post budget to grow your socials in 2022.
This budget doesn’t have to cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars; sometimes, even a few dollars a day can help give your content that extra boost you need when starting.
We’ll go into this more below!
Research and Create Engaging Social Content
It’s finally time to create your content!
With video content being more and more critical for businesses to create, we recommend starting with your content being at least 30% some form of video. This can include reels, GIFs, or any type of moving animation.
According to Cisco, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic in 2022 — 15 times higher than in 2017.
We also recommend making content designed to be engaged with and shared.
In today’s endless sea of social media content being published every day, only the best content that deserves to get shared and engaged with does.
Post and Analyze Your Results
The metrics and KPIs that you defined in your plan in the beginning are now going to come in handy.
After about three months, you should be able to check your insights and results to make sure those KPIs you wanted to track are performing as you had hoped. If not, then determine why and how to fix that.
You will also want to make sure the right audience is visiting your socials. It’s fine if you have a few people “outside” your audience, but your overall majority should be the type of people you are trying to reach.
If not, you will have to ask yourself why that is.
Adjust Your Marketing Strategy As Necessary
Once you have this information, you’ll start creating better content that your audience will want to share and engage with.
Marketing strategies are living, breathing things and should be adjusted and changed as needed. No plan is meant to remain stagnant.
This is key to growing your social media.
How to Grow Your Socials
Before we get started, there are two important factors we wanted to mention first.
First, these tips and suggestions are meant to work in conjunction with your social media plan. If you have no plan or strategy for your social media, it is doubtful you will grow your socials.
Can it still happen? Absolutely!
But it will be much more challenging to grow your social media brand and community without a plan or strategy.
Second, your family and friends more than likely are not your target audience. While it’s completely fine for them to follow you and engage with your content occasionally, do not be offended if they aren’t interested in what you are selling or offering.
Your target audience probably doesn’t include your 75-year-old Aunt from Germany and your 22-year-old nephew from Los Angeles. Not only that, but your family and friends can skew your insights when you’re growing an account and community from scratch.
If your audience is men from 18 to 24, having your mom and her friends share your content will shift your insights into thinking your core audience is older women.
Now let’s dive into the ten ways how to grow your social media following!
Choose the Right Platform for Your Audience
Not every platform is created equal! Depending on your audience, they might not be on the platform you are currently on or were thinking of being on.
The chart below should help you determine which platforms would be best for your business.
Optimize Your Bios
Your bio is one of the first things new visitors will see when they find your account. Optimizing it to be easy-to-understand with a clear CTA (call-to-action) is key to keeping their attention long enough to check out the rest of your content.
Here are four ways to optimize your social media bio:
Clarify and simplify your brand name: It might seem like a good idea to have a unique name on social media, but in reality, this only hurts your SEO and conversions. If people can’t understand your business from the name alone, they won’t engage further. Additionally, search engines can’t index your social content if it’s under a different name. Make sure you stick to your brand name across all profiles to ensure they’re getting the most engagement possible.
Update your bio with short, easy-to-understand information: New consumers check out your profile because they search for details about your brand and what you offer. They want to know what you sell, who your audience is, and how they can benefit from your product or service. However, it’s challenging to figure that out without an optimized bio section.
Provide the right links: Linktrees or link in bios are popular for brands these days, but don’t overdo it. Your link in bio should contain your main website, a link to a landing page or two, a way to sign up for your email list, and one or two other relevant links. We don’t recommend using more than five links in your bio link area, as this can come off as spammy and hard to get through.
Use keywords: Keywords are now an essential part of social media. Optimizing your bio to have the keywords your audience is searching for can help increase your following and reach.
As you can see from our bio above, it is easy to understand
Who we are
What we do
Who are our audience is
What our links are for
Invest in Quality Branding and Video Marketing
As we mentioned earlier in this blog, online videos will make up more than 82% of consumer internet traffic in 2022.
Consumers increasingly expect video media as they navigate products and services, using it to inform their decision-making processes and educate themselves on essential features.
Video marketing is also a great way to capture your audience’s attention in a split second. Think about it…how often do you mindlessly scroll through social media without really paying attention?
Video marketing is the easiest way to grab their attention within the first nanosecond they scroll onto your content.
It is also important because it can communicate a story. This type of social media content works because it allows businesses to convey emotions and answer the essential whys surrounding the marketing of products and services.
Stories build empathy and can move more significant audience numbers towards sales. As a result, storytelling is changing marketing and consumerism.
Conduct Hashtag Research
Using the right hashtags is essential. And no, you probably aren’t using the ones you should be.
When using hashtags for your business, you want to focus on hashtags your audience uses to find your product or service that aren’t already bombarded with millions and millions of other posts.
Using a generic hashtag with 3 million posts won’t help you be seen, but using a niche hashtag with only 100k might.
Here are five tips for conducting conducive hashtag research:
Start with a core keyword as a hashtag.
Generate more keyword/hashtag ideas similar to your core hashtag
Understand each hashtag's usage and popularity.
Analyze which hashtags bring you traffic and which aren’t, and swap them out when needed.
Use hashtags based on your content - do not use the same ones every time!
Engage With Your Audience
Engaging with your audience is the most important tool when growing your socials. If you don’t engage, chat with, and understand your community - no one is going to buy from you.
However, if you don’t have a following, which many new social accounts won’t have, joining groups and creating them will help to get your name out there.
Remember, though, only promoting your brand creates a bad impression. Groups and forums aren’t there to talk about yourself only. Don’t be the big-headed brand that talks about themselves only!
Engaging with your audience in a real, honest manner and building relationships with them instead of constantly selling to them is key.
Be Consistent in Your Posting
Posting on an inconsistent basis will make your audience and potential followers feel like your business is inconsistent as well.
While you don’t have to post at the same time every day, posting the same amount (and preferably on the same days) each week will help.
Posting regularly on social media is important because it helps your business stay top-of-mind to your followers! You are more likely to generate leads using social media when you are memorable.
Utilize Landing Pages and Email Marketing
It might seem that landing pages and emails might not help you grow your socials, but these sources actually have an amazing impact on your social media.
Your social media can be the best way to promote your email lists and landing pages and give your audience an offer they will want to engage with.
Email marketing can help increase engagement on social media by reminding subscribers that your brand has an active social community. If you do giveaways on your social media, emails are the perfect way to hype up your content.
Landing pages are the middleman between your audience and your website, and the best place for your landing pages to be seen is through social media.
Create social media-specific landing pages with offers you can only receive on social, and your landing pages will help your email list and web traffic grow as well.
Include a CTA in Every Post
Read our newest blog post.
Let us know how you feel!
Tag a friend who…
We’ve all seen CTAs on other social media, posts, but did you know they all have a specific purpose? Your call to action will change based on your content and reason for use.
If your goal is to increase engagement, your CTA won’t be “share on your stories!” But if your goal is to increase your brand awareness, it might be!
When it comes to using CTAs though, there are a few rules you need to follow…
Keep your CTAs short while urging “quick” action.
Personalize your CTAs based on the content and intent
Only use one per caption/post
Make sure your landing pages back up your CTA if they are tied together
Use action words when possible
Don’t Cross-Post or Treat Social Media the Same Across Every Platform
One of the biggest mistakes new brands make on social media is treating all social media platforms the same.
Not only could your audience be completely different, but they also absorb content differently as well.
Facebook is better for text posts or longer videos, while Instagram audiences usually want to be entertained only for a few seconds.
It’s also the fastest way to have your audiences grow tired of your content and brand. Keeping your content fresh and different on each platform gives them a reason to follow you on more than one medium.
Test your content on each platform, see what your specific audience prefers, and create content that they engage with and reach the most accounts.
Utilize Paid Advertising and Sponsored Posts if Possible
Getting started with paid social media feels like a big leap for most businesses, especially when figuring out the best way to utilize ads and sponsored posts to grow your socials.
In reality, though, 75% of all marketers run paid social campaigns.
A well-crafted campaign can produce immediate results for your business from raising brand awareness to driving traffic and leads. However, we recommend knowing exactly who your audience and buyer personas are before running ads.
Since ads are targeted at a specific group of people, not knowing who you are selling can waste ad spending and bring the wrong audience to your campaign.
Key Takeaways
Creating a solid social media plan will always help you grow your socials, just like using these tips to grow your social media will help you create a stronger social media plan!
You should focus on creating posts and sharing information that will attract the right people - the people that you need to engage, take action, and develop a loyal relationship along the line.
When used strategically and thoughtfully, social media platforms can be an excellent way for brands to connect with audiences, grow loyal followers, and expand their reach and audience!
PS.
We’ll be on YouTube soon! So make sure you subscribe to our Newsletter on the blog main page to be informed of when that happens.
Kellyann Doyle is a Content Marketing Writer at Zoek, an SEO, Web Design, and Digital Marketing Agency that assists small and medium-sized businesses with their online footprint. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in 2013 from the University of Houston with a Major in Communications and a Minor in Marketing and has been working in the Digital Marketing world ever since. When not working, you can find Kellyann trying new recipes, enjoying a good nap, or watching Friends for the 500th time.