Getting Social: 15 Ways to Grow Your Social Media Presence and Get Noticed
“If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
It’s an age-old philosophical question intended to illustrate the link between subjective and objective reality. But, it’s also very relevant to the world of social media marketing.
After all, your business might post the wittiest tweets or the most incredible images, but the message will be lost if no one’s there to receive it.
Of course, producing original, high-quality posts is a great start. But, you also need to work on cultivating a following to ensure that you have an audience to appreciate your hard work.
Read on to find out how to grow your social media presence and get noticed.
1. Identify Your Audience
How are you meant to speak to your audience if you don’t know who they are?
As a form of customer-centric inbound marketing, it’s crucial to identify your social media audience. This will help you define your brand’s voice and decide which social media platforms to focus on, as well as the timing and content of your posts.
Devote time to reviewing your audience’s personas, online activity and the brands and posts they respond to. This kind of competitive analysis will prove invaluable when it comes to learning how to increase social media presence for your brand.
2. Make Your Presence Visible
If you’re wondering how to grow social media visibility, the easiest way is to make sure you have visible social media icons on your website. These icons should appear on the pages with the most traffic, such as your homepage, blog, and contact page.
You can also achieve extra exposure by adding social media icons to your employee’s email signatures.
Likewise, ensure that your social media pages link back to your website. The idea is to create a link between all of the ways customers can find you online, wherever they start off.
3. Define Goals and Objectives
Now you know who you’re targeting and have ensured that they can find you online, it’s time to define the goals of your social media strategy.
These goals need to be specific and measurable so that you have something to aim for and ways to know if you’ve achieved it. It’s also best to set goals that are achievable based on your current social media status.
This could involve increasing your engagement rate on Instagram by 25 percent before the end of the quarter.
Or, it could be something more customer-focused, such as aiming for a maximum response time of four hours for Twitter queries.
4. Cross Promote on Different Platforms
If your brand is popular on Instagram but has a meager Facebook following, make sure to cross-promote across different platforms. If your followers like you on one network, they’re a good place to start to draw more followers to another platform.
That said, part of identifying your audience includes understanding how they use different social media sites.
You might find that #relatable tweets are popular on Twitter, while your Instagram fans respond best to beautiful aesthetics.
Use these differences to draw fans from one platform to another.
For example, you could post a great image on Instagram and then entice followers to see some funny behind-the-scenes footage on Twitter.
5. Create a Content Schedule
Trying to keep on top of multiple social channels and follow timing schedules is difficult, to say the least.
A content schedule is a must to make your social grow. This will give you an overall view of what and when you’re posting, helping you avoid repeated content or overlapping post-timing.
As such, you’ll achieve maximum engagement while keeping to your strategy on how to increase social media presence.
6. Show Your Brand’s Human Side
Social media makes your brand much more accessible and visible. And followers are often keen to find a brand with a human connection. As such, it’s definitely not acceptable to be a faceless corporation anymore.
Instead, you want to use social media as a way to show your brand’s personality. Many brands talk to their followers as they would their friends, by cracking jokes and sharing memes.
It’s also a great idea to put the spotlight on the faces behind your company. That could mean Instagram stories showing your creative team hard at work, office snapshots, or a weekly tweet featuring a funny quote from a team member.
7. Seek to Build Relationships
The follower count on many brand profiles can be misleading. Achieving a high level of engagement is what really matters. That means building strong relationships rather than seeking a better-looking headcount on your social profiles.
It might sound like a cliche, but you shouldn’t forget the social in social media.
A lifelong bond can be formed by a well-timed, well-thought-out response, so don’t neglect the value of relationships by chasing followers.
8. Offer Solutions, Not Sales Pitches
Whether you’re posting on your blog or on social media, your focus should be to provide quality information and represent your brand as an authority in your field.
Even if you operate an e-commerce site, leave the hard sell to your website banners, advertisements, and email marketing campaigns.
Respond to follower questions quickly and efficiently, and create content that directly relates to the kinds of issues your followers ask about the most.
Above all, your focus should be on helping, not selling.
9. Provide Value
Focusing on building relationships with your followers and seeking to offer solutions is a great way to provide value as a brand.
But, in order to entice them to follow you in the first place, consider giving them something back. This might be a free trial period, a discount code, or even liking their page in return.
This helps to engage them, creating the basis for a relationship to develop.
10. Get Visual
If you’re ever in doubt, visual content is always a winner.
If Instagram’s popularity wasn’t enough to convince you, live Facebook videos get at least six times as many interactions as other content.
And, infographics, memes, and GIFs always get more Twitter shares than text-based posts. In fact, posting more images on Twitter can increase your engagement by 200 percent.
But, there’s no need to panic about blowing all your funds on production or graphic design. Instead, consider photos and videos of happy customers, team members, brand events and behind-the-scenes footage.
And, if you’re feeling creative, try your hand at creating infographics or a brand-relevant meme.
11. Follow Trends
While you should avoid anything overly political or controversial, it often pays to get topical by reacting to breaking news, trending topics or the latest meme.
As well as helping to get your brand noticed off the back of an existing trend, it’s also a great opportunity to display your brand’s personality.
12. Be Original
That said, to stand out on social media, your main focus should be on creating original content.
This means establishing your brand’s social space as a destination for content that sets you apart from your competitors. It could be original and thought-provoking blog posts, well-researched advice, or incredible visual content.
Whatever you have to offer that makes you stand out from the social media crowd, use it to make your followers stop and take notice.
13. Seek Out Engagement
Replying to comments and questions on social media is an excellent way to build rapport, but it’s not just about being responsive.
You also need to search for and react to hashtags, comments, and @mentions of your brand to show that you’re interested in what they have to say, wherever they say it.
After all, while some followers will show their love with a comment or emoji, others will post photos of them using your products.
You should also direct questions back to your followers. This will help you find out what they want and is a great way to start a conversation.
It could be something as simple as posting a gorgeous beach photo and asking them where their dream vacation would be and why.
14. Sharing is Caring
Getting a re-tweet or an Instagram re-post is the modern-day equivalent of a radio shout out.
It’s a great way to attract engagement as your followers will try hard to impress you in an attempt to get your attention and maybe increase their own following.
And, it’ll cost you nothing to reward them with the prize of a re-post – just make sure they agree to it first.
15. Stay Active
Once your presence on social media starts to pick up, you have to ensure you keep riding that wave.
The world of social media moves quickly. There’s no time to rest on past glories of record engagement figures if you don’t keep up the momentum.
That means keeping to a regular schedule day in, day out.
The good news is, as you become more familiar with what works and what doesn’t, you’ll find you can be more efficient while keeping up excellent engagement rates.
How to Grow Your Social Media Presence
When it comes to growing your social media presence, there’s no secret formula.
But, with these winning tactics and a lot of hard work, you’ll be well on your way to improving your social media engagement and developing lifelong relationships with your followers.
For more information on our social media marketing services, contact us today.
