As a marketer, the importance of growing your social media presence cannot be overstated. The higher the number of people you can reach with your campaigns, the greater your chances of success.
Social media profiles used to be a “nice-to-have” for brands in the past, but a lot has changed since the early days of the major social platforms.
With more than 3.5 billion users waiting to be reached with your brand message, it makes perfect sense to always be on the lookout for social media growth hacks that work. This article has all the best ones for you!
Here is the list of top growth hacks that can be implemented for your business to gain maximum engagement over social media.
Stick to the Platforms that are Relevant to Your Brand
There are more than a dozen social media platforms competing for your attention on the internet today. But should you expend energy on all of them?
Before you create a profile on any social media platform, you need to find out the user demographics on the platform in general. Compare this to your average audience profile to work out if a platform is worth your time and energy.
By focusing on only platforms where your customers spend their time, your campaigns will bring more results. For many businesses, Facebook and Instagram are usually enough.
If your content-strategy is video-heavy, you’ll also need to have a presence on YouTube. Combining Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest is a great idea if your content is picture-centric.
Use your buyer persona and your brand content strategy to choose two to three platforms to focus on.
Some of the things you should watch out for include the platforms where they are most active, the type of content they are sharing on each platform, the frequency of posting, the engagement tactics they deploy, etc.
By analyzing your competition’s social media strategies, you can emulate social media marketing approaches that have been proven to work in your niche. Such analysis will also show you gaping holes you can fill with your brand’s social media.
Revamp Your Social Profiles
Your profile page is the signage your audience will read first once they come in contact with your brand on social media.
If you don’t have a clutter-free and correctly filled out profile, you are not just giving off vibes of unprofessionalism, but also derailing your social campaigns.
It is important to ensure uniformity with all the details on your social media pages. If you have conflicting information across your profiles, you are giving your audience one more reason to not engage with your brand.
Your social profiles should make it easier for people to make up their minds about your brand instead of getting them even more confused.
A good tip here is to ensure your personal social profiles (and those of your staff) are a good reflection of your brand image.
Fill out the profile data and use the profiles to further amplify your brand message.
If you already have a brand personality or brand voice, strive to maintain it across your social profiles.
It is counterproductive to deploy a scatter-gun approach with your branding.
Don’t ignore elements like the color theme for your brand profile and a specified tone.
When your audience associates your brand with a distinctively professional tone across your platforms, it is not a good idea to try your hands at infusing humor into your content.
The best business profiles trigger a connection with their target audience by using branding elements consistently.
Swinging from one end of the spectrum to another willy-nilly is a sure way to lose your audience.
Content is king everywhere, and social media is no exception. You need to ensure you are consistently creating shareable content that is relevant to your target audience.
This way, you can slowly establish your brand as one of the most trusted in your niche. For the best results, don’t focus on sharing your content alone.
An effective content-related social media growth hack you need to copy this 2020 is to only promote your brand with just 10% of your social media posts.
You should spend the rest of your time sharing your original posts and responding to the pain points of your target audience and sharing relevant content from other people.
If you spend far too much time on social media, promoting only your brand, you will leave your audience mentally jaded.
Sharing valuable information that truly helps your audience is a great way to keep them engaged and also get them to trust your brand.
Additionally, don’t forget to shake up your content strategy to reflect what your audience wants to see.
For example, we are in an era where visual content gets more attention than text.
Find new ways to communicate your messages visually. Infographics, explainer videos, webinars, and live broadcasts are just some examples.
Encourage Your Followers to Share Your Content
Even when a user is impressed by a bit of content, they may need a little encouragement to share it with other people. Add some call-to-action that will remind the user to share your content.
However, you should only use this strategy when you have a blog post or landing page to share. The CTA, which is one of the top elements of the web design, should be in your blog post and not on the social media content.
Nobody likes an “engagement beggar” on social media. Always asking for retweets, comments, likes, etc. on your social media posts is unprofessional.
Hashtags are a perfect way to draw attention to your social media posts. By using those relevant to your content, you can make your content discoverable to your target audience. Think of hashtags as keywords, but for social media.
The rise of Twitter saw the birth of hashtags. Users on other platforms rely on them today to drive awareness to their posts. To get the best results with your hashtags, you need to work out what keywords your customers are searching for.
What keywords are relevant to your business? What keywords best describe the content you’d like to share? Answer these questions, and you will have the best possible collection of hashtags for your social media posts.
A good tip is to keep an excel sheet for your hashtag research so you will always be prepared.
As you build your business social profile, you’ll find out that the organic growth of your business is difficult to achieve, especially if you want to generate results quickly.
Social media adverts offer an excellent way to draw closer to your goals over a short period.
Social media ads work because they allow you to unlock a whole new level of reach by expanding your audience beyond your followers and their immediate circles.
Your brand message will be put in front of a highly targeted audience, thus increasing your chances of drawing more engagement.
For the best results, spend quality time on crafting your ad copy. Consider launching promotions or giveaways in your adverts as well to make your message more attractive to your prospects.
Stay Social and Engage
While chasing growth for your social media profile, it is easy for you to get caught up in the middle of it all and lose sight of the main reason for being on social media.
You are there to build an audience and engage with them. If you don’t engage your audience, they will get bored quickly and move on.
A few things you should do:
Always react to all brand mentions, including positive and negative. Negative mentions can draw more attention than positive, so you need to be extra careful with how you handle a disgruntled customer. If you ignore that negative comment, it will go away, but only after it has made a few dozen prospects even warier of your brand.
Tag other thought leaders in your niche if a prospect reaches out to you with something you can’t help them with.
Social media users love it when brands interact with them. With more interactions, you will retain your existing audience and attract new ones.
How many times have you had to check out a brand because a social media user mentioned them in a positive light?
That is the power of social proof at work. Users love it when the legwork has been done for them when it comes to vetting a brand.
If User A thinks a brand is good at what they do, others in his immediate social circle will want to see what the brand is about. This will translate into more loyal followers and paying customers.
Gather all positive comments about your brand and use them regularly across your social campaigns.
Unfortunately, happy customers generally won’t go out of their way to give a review. Nudge all customers to leave an honest review of your products or services.
This way you will have more positive comments to use as social proof and also work on any negatives that have been highlighted.
The result of this approach is that you will attract more social media users that will not be on the defensive when reading your brand message.
Growing your social media presence as a business is challenging. However, with these tried and tested growth hacks and some dedication, you will achieve great results.
Focus on engaging with your audience and solving as many of their problems as possible with most of your posts. In an era where the average consumer only wants relevant experiences, a set-and-forget approach to social media marketing will not work.
Rithesh Raghavan, Co-Founder, and Director at Acodez IT Solutions, who has a rich experience of 16+ years in IT & Digital Marketing. Between his busy schedule, whenever he finds the time he writes up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development. All thanks to his master brain behind the gleaming success of Acodez.
