The stronger your social media presence, the more highly potential customers will think of your brand. If you have a multitude of followers, not only will you be reaching a larger audience but you’ll get more engagement, drive more traffic, and even boost your SEO efforts. Here are a few crafty ways to get more followers–without paying an arm and a leg!
Choose The Right Channels
This one goes without saying. You’ll never grow your following if you’re chasing the wrong customers. While it’s okay to spread your presence over a few different platforms, make sure they’re the ones your customers are on. So how do you figure out where your customers are?
- Search relevant topics and keywords across social media to see where the traffic is.
- Look for relevant groups and discussions across different platforms.
- Where are your competitors advertising on social media?
Knowing where your audience spends their time is only half the battle.
Next, you have to learn how to best utilize the platform(s) of your choice. This is where you find out how each kind of content drives different actions, reactions, and engagement.
Optimize Your Content
Once you know where your audience spends their time, you have to figure out how to reach them. After all, the average person sees thousands of pieces of content daily. Keeping your content fresh and invigorating will help it break through all the “noise.”
To optimize your content, pick a few major themes/topics/areas of concern and focus your attention on them. Consider the different ways you can approach these major content pillars and plan a content series around building awareness, interest, consideration, or conversions.
Optimizing your social media profiles can be immensely impactful as well. From choosing the right photos to selecting easy-to-remember handles/usernames to including the right density of visible, user-friendly keywords, make your social media profile a cog in the SEO wheel.
The more visible your social media profiles are (both on the platforms themselves and search engines), the more people will find–and follow you.
Share & Collaborate
Sometimes, you just can’t do it alone. If you can collaborate with the right people–who also have a large, highly engaged following–you can add their followers. While it’s not necessarily easy to attract influencers–especially in an organic manner–getting people to promote and share your products, services, and content is a great way to get more followers.
In addition to collaborating with influencers, look to share and engage with relevant, topical content. Look to find other brands and pages with similar audiences and interests to share their posts and add to their conversations. If you do this frequently enough, your visibility will skyrocket, meaning you’ll grow your follower count.
Drive Traffic Across Platforms
Just like your website, your social media presence isn’t a standalone part of your marketing strategy. Each piece in the marketing mix should supplement and complement one another, meaning your website should link to social media–and vice versa.
Cross-promotion is another classic strategy to increase visibility and get more followers. Don’t be afraid to directly appeal to folks to follow all your pages. Stress the importance of each individual page and what folks should expect to gain from following that page.
Plus, by cross-promoting your content, you can make sure no one misses out on your best, most valuable content. For example, maybe you published an insightful blog post–and folks saw it on Facebook and your website. But because it was never promoted on Instagram, a segment of your audience missed out on it. Instead, take advantage of all your platforms, cross-promote, and don’t be afraid to recycle old or curated content.
Get More Followers Now!
There are numerous ways to grow your follower count–but many of them cost money–and their effectiveness is negligible. Stick to the basics and you’ll get more followers, drive more traffic, and engineer more conversions without stretching your budget!