No matter what stage your startup or business is in, you’ll want to start or continue to grow your social media audience. The more people you can reach on social media organically and through advertising, the better your chances of good sales will be.
Here are some helpful tips to grow your social media audience and build a viable community online;
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Set Social Media Goals
To start and sustain your social media growth, you need to set your social media goals first. Social media goals are similar to your New Year’s resolution goals – you need to do everything that you can to achieve them. By tracking your progress, you’ll think of more tactics that will help you achieve your social media goals.
The most common goal setting technique is called S-M-A-R-T, short for:
- Specific: Clearly defined goals.
- Measurable: Goals that can be monitored and analyzed.
- Achievable: Can you achieve your goals with the resources at hand?
- Realistic: With your schedule, team, and resources are those goals realistic?
- Time-sensitive: You’ll need an exact timeframe for your goals.
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Plan and Strategize
If you want to succeed with social media marketing, the first thing you need to do is to develop a social media strategy If you don’t, you’ll publish something random and hope that someone will randomly read your content. If you know your target audience and if you have an actual plan to capture their attention, standing out on social media will be pretty straightforward. -
Provide Value
If you want to build an audience, a sure way to success is to help others succeed by solving a problem they have or giving them a way to solve that problem. You don’t have to be an engineer to build something people need, but it surely helps. You can build a list of your favorite tools that others might like, build a quick software tool to complete a tedious task that people routinely come across, or write a quick e-book explaining something and give it out for free. Value comes in different way. Find the one that best resonate with you can work around that. -
Post Consistently
Being consistent with your messaging is a key to success in marketing, and that holds true when growing an audience on Instagram, twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media channel. Research says that the average Instagram user posts once a day. It also states that users with the highest number of fans post 2 to 3 photos per day. This data suggests that if you want to gain more followers then you should post with higher frequency. -
Understand and Use Hashtags
The right hashtag can expose your photo to a large and targeted audience, even if those users don’t follow you. Hashtags are used on other social networks like Twitter, but Instagram users don’t seem to mind hashtag stuffing like they do on Twitter. Don’t be afraid to load up on relevant hashtags that your target audience might be following. Instagram allows up 30 hashtags per photo. Many power-users take advantage of this and max them out.
To sum up, planning and strategizing are critical before everything else if you want to achieve social media growth. The other component that matters is engagement, and you must spark it and perform it across all of your social media channels.
Bottom line, if you don’t opt for the tips above, your social media growth is almost impossible. Work hard to stand out! Constantly share valuable content, develop a community that interacts with your brand voice, monitor your progress, and before you know it, you’ll have a social media presence that is limitless and unique.