Even though Facebook is still the number one social network worldwide (15 million active users per month in Australia, 2018), some other social media channels gained increasing popularity in the past couple of years. This is also due to the change, that different target groups use different social media channels. It’s becoming more and more obvious that Facebook tends to have a bit older users (25+ yo) than Instagram or Snapchat, who are especially popular with teens and young adults (14-25 yo).
This is nothing bad – actually quite the opposite: Depending on which age group your business wants to target, you know where to find them. It’s all about knowing your clients and their habits and therefore concentrating your social media efforts into the channels which your clients actually use. Now that you figured out on which platform you need to focus your efforts, here are five tips to grow your social media channels.
1. Invest Time
If you want to grow your brand page organically, you need to invest lots of time. Yes, there are shady offers to buy 10,000 followers, but social media platforms fight aggressively against these kind of fake profiles and delete them as fast as you can buy them. Let your growth be organically, for it takes more time, but brings way better results, as you’ve actually won new and real customers who are interested in you and your products and continue to like and interact with your posts.
We don’t want to promise you rainbows and butterflies, social media growth is a long process, so plan to invest time regularly. Start with filling out all details of your profile, write engaging copy text and publish a handful of posts, so when you start to grow your channel, interested users can already see some of your content. The more hours you spend growing your channel, the more results you will get.
2. Create the Right Kind of Posts
The one big rule is that your posts should change to keep up the interest of your (sson to be) followers, so don’t always post the same picture of the same things with the same caption. Facebook offers polls, so your users can easily interact with you and at the same time learn more about your products. Videos tend to get better interaction rates. Try different types of content, like quotes, statements, questions, behind the scenes material, product insights… your fantasy is your limit. Get in touch with your followers – because social media is all about opening yourself up for the conversation.
When taking pictures, make sure the pictures are of a good quality, which means: clear, simple pictures, good light that brings out natural colours, clean backgrounds (no clutter or trash cans etc.) and focus on the product. The joke nowadays is that nobody even looks at your post anymore, if you don’t include a picture – so make sure your picture looks great, as it’s the first thing people see and the thing they’ll keep in mind most.
3. Follow Others
If your brand is world-famous, then maybe you won’t need to do that, as people will know you anyways. But in most cases, a large part of the population doesn’t even know you exist, so go out there and start interacting with people. On Instagram, the easiest way is to follow others, which has two advantages: You can follow people interested or known in your niche to get content ideas and inspiration from them, and you’ll also make them aware of yourself.
On Facebook, following others as a business page is not possible. You can select a handful of pages to follow, but this is an adjustment in the administration part of your site to help you getting content ideas and comparing yourself to others. Therefore, Facebook growth is a bit harder, if you don’t want to invest lots of money or wait to grow organically. You can start by inviting your friends to your Facebook page to get some first followers.
4. Make People Aware of You
This is a key part of social media growth, and depending on which channel, there’s different ways to do this. On Facebook, growing options are limited organically – you need people to carry out your messages. Friends and family will only share your posts so much, so you can i.e. use your personal profile to share your company or posts in suitable Facebook groups (please pay attention to advertising rules of each group). You can always use a paid marketing campaign with a correctly set target group and a great post for an initial growth of followers, which will help you with an organic growth in the long run. When people like your posts, check the likes and send invites to those people who liked your post but don’t follow your page yet.
On Instagram, you can follow others or like their pictures. That is usually the easiest and fastest way – the more time you spend skimming through content on Instagram, liking pictures, commenting them and following users, the more people become aware of you. About a third of them either leaves you likes or follows you as well. You also have the possibility to do a paid marketing campaign on Instagram (Tip: When you schedule your campaign on the Facebook Ad Manager for Instagram, you can define more detailed settings to focus your budget). Use different hashtags for each post and get inspiration for different hashtags when browsing through other people’s posts.
5. Connect Offline and Online
A very good way to draw people’s attention to social media is using offline media or other online channels. Include your social media links on your website, print your social media names on your take away menu or your business cards, get stickers for your business door to remind people you’re on social media. Don’t be shy in letting people know where they can find you on social media. Be creative! In some businesses, it’s even possible to ask clients for a review on Facebook or to upload a picture of them wearing your hand-made hats on Instagram. Once your social media accounts start growing, continue with your measures to keep up a steady increase in users.
