Social media marketing has been one of the shining lights of the past decade of online content. At this point in the game, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that completely avoids social media, with 71% of adults actively using an online account. That usage isn’t exactly a small figure either, with the average user spending nearly 3 hours a day on their social media platforms.
With the huge social media audience that’s available, more and more companies are turning their sights on this digital space. Over time, social media marketing has risen, with the desire to have a large business audience equally growing. Yet, building a social media audience is easier said than done.
In this article, we’ll explore exactly how your company can begin to build up their social media audience following. Over time, these tips will launch you toward an account with higher interaction and further social reach online.
Let’s get right into it.
Why Should a Company Build a Social Media Audience?
As a centralized location with potentially millions of viewers each day, a social media platform is the perfect site to focus on cultivating new customers and leads on. While your business will start with no followers at all, the more you gain, the more benefits you’re able to reap from social media as a platform.
The larger your social media platform becomes, the benefits will become even more potent:
- Brand Visibility – Social media is a prime location for finding new customers. By increasing your posting schedule and getting more content out, you’re able to increase the number of potential customers that are seeing your posts. Over time, this will help boost your brand visibility across all platforms.
- Brand Authority – As your company gains more followers, you start to see more established. The higher this figure goes, the more reliable and trustworthy your brand looks.
- Audience Insights – We live in an age of data. By being able to see what your social media audience likes and dislikes, you can use data-driven marketing to inform all campaigns going forward.
While only a short insight into the range of benefits that building your social media following gives, this glimpse demonstrates the power of social media marketing for your business.
How To Build Your Social Media Following – Four Easy Methods
Building your social media profile definitely doesn’t happen overnight. That said, there are a few ways that you can radically speed up the process.
Here are four strategies you should be following if you want to increase the social media following of your company account:
- Profile Optimization
- Stay Active
- Make the Most of Trends
- Visual Content is King
Let’s break these down further.
Profile Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an acronym that the vast majority of marketers will be familiar with. While it is something that’s incredibly common within website design and content marketing, people seem to forget that it also comes into play on social media platforms.
To help improve the SEO of your social media pages, you should:
- Keep profile photos the same across all pages (don’t forget your meta descriptions!)
- Include your main business keywords within your bio to help with searchability
- Include outbound links that go back to your home site
Small changes like these can create a big difference in terms of the searchability of a brand profile.
Stay Active – Things Don’t Happen Overnight
It can be exhausting trying to start a social media account, especially with how slow the first few thousand followers can be. The most important thing to remember is that you should be as consistent as possible. While not every company has the budget for daily posts, you should try and post as often as you can.
Consistent posting will snowball your efforts, helping to expose you to more people and gain followers quickly.
Make the Most of Trends
Trends come and go on social media – normally faster than many can keep up with. This is especially true if your marketing team doesn’t stay on top of them or has to go through many levels of accepting posts before they launch.
Try and create a streamlined content production process, making and releasing content to keep up with trends as they arise. As they’ll only last one or two days, you need to stay alert and post in line with them. Trends are a great way to pull in a sharp increase in viewership.
You can even take some of the trending content you’re seeing on social media and recycle it into other marketing campaigns. Email marketing and social media go wonderfully together, with content produced for one easily being upscaled for the other. By taking social media content and putting it into an email, you can quickly produce content for multiple streams at once.
Equally, incorporating social media buttons into your email signature can be a great way of driving more traffic to your pages. Using an Outlook signature template, you can get a feel of how to fit these icons in naturally, without interrupting your company branding.
Visual Content is King
Finally, when creating social media content, remember that visual content is often king. While video content is currently dominating a range of the biggest social media platforms, it goes beyond this.
Infographics and other visual creations are much easier to understand than written posts. On social media, you only have a few seconds before people scroll. Visual content is much easier to process, helping you to get your point over even faster.
What’s more, visual content has a higher likelihood of being shared, which will promote your content to even more people. Social media is very much like a snowball rolling down a hill. As soon as something starts to gain traction, it’s much easier to sustain it.
Visual content can be the first push that you need.
Final Thoughts
Social media is a competitive space, but one that’s well worth investing time into. When done correctly, social media can rapidly become a space filled with new leads and connections for your business. From finding new clients to streamlining customer service and keeping your current user base happy, social media can provide a range of benefits for your business.
That said, social media is rarely a fast game. Developing a following can take months or even years, so it’s best to get started as soon as possible. By following some of the strategies that we’ve outlined in this article, you’ll be well on your way to cultivating a large social media following.
Best of luck!
