How to Grow Your Social Media Presence Effectively

Social media marketing is the most effective way for brands, institutions, and organizations to engage with their audiences. It also helps them raise brand awareness, generate leads and revenue.

When I started telling business owners this about 8 years ago, most of them used to brush me off but today, this is very unlikely.

With a strong following in any major social media networks, businesses can easily spread the word about their latest offers, products, initiatives, campaigns, etc. But even if you have 5,000 Facebook fans or 1000 followers on Instagram, this is not the barometer of your social media success.

There is a high chance that most of your fans or followers never read your social media posts or click through the links you post. I’m sure we’ve all been through this.

So here’s what you need to do…

You need to build a thriving community (or a tribe) of like-minded people who will actively interact with your content, share your posts with their network that will ultimately lead to more paying customers.

Here are eight tips through which you can grow your social media presence effectively and generate more revenue from your business.

Set Your SMART Goals

The SMART goals concept is one of the oldest marketing strategies that you can incorporate in your social media marketing strategy. Businesses should set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

For example, an effective SMART goal for social media marketing will sound like “we will increase our brand’s Facebook’s response rate by 20% for the next quarter”.

· Specific: Specifically identified the social media platform (Facebook) and a metric (response rate).
· Measurable: The response rate is measurable through a social media management company’s dashboard.
· Achievable: The claim of “20% response rate increase for the nest quarter” is certainly achievable and by no means outlandish.
· Relevant: The goal will have an impact on your brand’s overall social media presence. This makes the goal-relevant and achievable.
· Time-Bound: The goal is also time-bound as it has to be met by the end of the next quarter.

Know Your Target Audience

Once you determine your SMART goal, now narrow down a group of audience to whom you want to promote your brand. You can figure out the following by breaking down your prospective audience:

· Which social media platforms you are most active on
· When you post on your social media channels
· The type of content you post
· Information available on your social media profiles



You can identify your prospective audience in several ways, but the most effective one is through their personas. Although building an online audience persona takes time, it provides you a clearer perspective on who you are marketing your brand and how you should sell your products and services to them.

Give Your Brand a Voice

Now, ensure that your brand does not look like a faceless organization, and give your brand a voice and a human-like personality. Your prospective audience might want to interact with your brand personality, so don’t forget to:

· Reply to their comments on social media
· Share useful information about your brand on your social media
· Showcase your brand’s personality through your social media comments
· Share your office and BTS (behind-the-scenes) photos on social media or vlogs (my team at Neu Entity does this)
· Occasionally, show the face behind the brand (LIKE ME!)

Of course, there are various other ways to humanize a brand but try to use a method that you think will give your brand a human-like personality.

Incorporate Visuals with Every Post

Content with visuals always performs well on social media, so don’t forget to include an attractive, colorful photo or a graphic with every social media post.

Don’t just take it from me. Seriously… Take a look at the following visual marketing stats, compiled by HubSpot here.

· Content with relevant photos and graphics obtain up to 94% more viewership than content without visuals.
· Content with relevant visuals is 40x more likely to get shared on social media platforms.
· Instagram images showing faces gain 38% more likes than images without photos.

You can leverage several free graphic design software to incorporate graphics and photos in social media posts.

Publish More Video Content

Videos are the most engaging content type on every major social media platform. So, try to publish some form of video content to maximise engagement with your audience.

Upload your video content directly on your preferred social media platform instead of posting links to an external website such as YouTube. This will allow the video to autoplay whenever people land on it while scrolling their social media feeds grabbing more mindshare for your brand.

At Neu Entity, we put up vlogs so our audience (even clients) can see the happenings in the studio and how we do things.

People love behind-the-scenes! It makes them feel like they are part of who you are. And when you share with them how you do things, they feel like they are learning something from you and this positions you as an expert.

Listen and Respond to Your Online Audience

Another way to grow your social media audience is by giving your audience an amazing user experience on social media. Listen to their feedbacks and their needs carefully and respond appropriately.

Publicly recognize people who share, comment and mention your brand’s name on social media platforms, and thank people who comment on YouTube and Instagram.

When you publicly recognize your online community, they will more likely become fans of your brand and your most passionate representatives on social media.

Give People a Reason to Follow You on Social Media

Your current and prospective audience must have a valid reason to follow you on major social media platforms.

Don’t put generic and automated links across all your social media pages. Tailor your posts for each channel’s audience. Be entertaining with your posts and use humor to engage with your audience.

Strategically use each social media platform according to its clout and demographics, and give both your current and prospective audience a valid reason to connect with you on each social media platform.

Never Buy Social Media Followers

People often assume that buying social media fans and followers is the quickest way to build a huge online community. This is an extremely bad social media marketing practice that will cost you big time in the long run.

I’ve tested this personally on my own account and even though that was a couple of years ago, now, I can see the number of followers start to decrease. I suppose the accounts that unfollowed me are the fake fans.

The biggest problem with buying fake fans and followers is that it will damage your social media pages with automated content that will annoy your genuine followers. It will ruin your audience acumen, hamper your social media performance, and likely restrict the organic reach of your social media posts.

Focus more on creating quality and engaging posts and share relevant information that will attract the right audience with whom you can engage and cultivate a deeper relationship in years to come.

Conclusion

All these 8 tips are detailed and easy to implement. Incorporate them into your social media marketing strategy to grow your social media channels.

While you face hurdles initially while implementing these strategies, the more you practice implementing them into your social media profiles, the easier it will become.