There are several reasons you might be hoping to build a social media following. Maybe you’re trying to grow your business, and you’re using social media as a marketing tool. Or perhaps you want to be a social media influencer, and you need to build up your audience to start getting brand sponsors and partnerships. Whatever the reason for growing your social media following, there are some tried and tested ways for you to get there.
Not everyone can be the next big thing, but you can build a respectable number of followers if you know how. Use this guide to start growing your followers and become more popular.
Start with the Right Platform
Before doing anything else, it’s important to make sure you’re using the right social media platform for whatever it is you want to do. Of course, there are times when it’s suitable to use more than one platform, but you should consider adjusting your approach for each platform that you use.
- If you want to share a lot of visual content, Instagram is likely to be the right option.
- If you want to create a professional profile, LinkedIn could be for you. Facebook is useful for connecting to a general audience, while Twitter can give you international reach, and Youtube allows you to upload videos.
Find Accounts with Similar Audiences
When you’re trying to build a social following from scratch, it can be useful to look at your competitors or people and brands that share the audience that you want. You can follow both these accounts and the people that follow them to start building your own audience.
As well as doing this manually, you can use tools to help you do it. If you read this Kicksta review on danielshustle, you can see an example of how one of these tools works.
It’s a good idea to study these accounts too, taking note of the things that they do that their audiences like.
It will help you to understand what you should be posting.
Create a Consistent Brand
Whether you’re creating a social media presence for your business or for yourself as an individual, you need to have a consistent brand. This is about presenting an image on your social media profiles that your audience can recognize.
You don’t want to post anything that doesn’t fit your brand and seem out of character. Once people start to follow you, they will be expecting certain things from you. Being consistent with how you present yourself will make your posts recognizable and give your audience what they’re expecting. Of course, you can still try new things but stick to using the same style.
Consistently Share Content
Sharing content on a consistent basis is one of the most important things you can do if you’re trying to build your social media following. If you rarely post, you won’t get much attention. You should also avoid posting too often, but it’s better to publish content regularly than to only remember to share something every few weeks.
Try to mix up what you share too, and consider using different types of content, such as images, videos, and text posts.
Don’t Be Too Self-promotional
In terms of what type of content you should be posting, one thing to remember is that you shouldn’t promote yourself too much.
Only about 10% of what you share should be directly self-promotional, while everything else should be relevant to your audience but shouldn’t be pushing your own products or services.
However, you also need to be careful with promoting other brands. You may have to make it clear that any posts you’re getting paid to make are ads, and your audience might not want to see too many adverts.
Connect with the Right People
Connecting with influential people can be a good way to gain more followers on social media.
While following them is a good start, it also helps to reach out and try to engage with them properly.
Forming relationships with people who can help to promote you and get you into the right circles can help you to grow your followers. They can tag you in their posts, or their followers might follow you because they see that their favorite social media brands or personalities are following you.
Use the Right Hashtags in the Right Way
Hashtags are useful on several social media platforms. They are used to help people find content that they enjoy about different topics. You might use them on Twitter or Instagram, for example, although you might not use them so much on Facebook. Finding the popular hashtags that relate to your content will help you to use the best ones when you post.
Consider how to use them, too; should you incorporate them with other text or add them at the end of your posts?
Use Paid Advertising
Social media allows you to build a following without spending any money, but you can also benefit from using paid advertising.
All social media platforms have paid advertising and promoted post options, which make it possible for you to get extra exposure for your social accounts and pages.
If you’re not sure, you can spend just a little bit of money on trying it out to see whether it helps you.
Most advertising platforms have great targeting tools to help you advertise to the right people.
Talk to Your Followers
Engaging with your followers is another important way to grow your fanbase. Instead of just posting content for your followers to see, you should make sure that you’re interacting with them.
Have conversations with them, ask them questions, hold competitions, and find other ways to engage with them. Engaging with your followers will increase the level of activity that you show without you having to make lots of separate posts. It also helps people to feel like you really care, and you treat all of your followers as individuals.
There are many ways you can build your social media following to grow your social media profile. You can use free methods or spend some money to promote your pages.
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