Social media is a way of life for younger generations. Teens are engulfed in Instagram and Snapchat, often stopping mid-sentence to send a picture back to their friends. Twitter is a hotspot for 20 – 35-year-olds, while Facebook has nearly 2+ billion monthly users.
Anyone focusing on brand awareness or personal branding needs to be active on social media.
You’re going to enter a realm of billions of people, and it’s your goal to build your following. Stand out from the crowd and offer something different, something memorable.
But how?
It’s not a race; it’s a marathon. You need to be in for the long-term if you hope to be able to build your social media following. Short-term gains will eventually slow and may even be lost if you stop the effort.
I’m going to share how you can build your social media following today.
1. Use Tools to Help “Automate” Your Efforts
Social media is about being real. You can’t fake being real, and I am not advocating automating everything. But you can automate posting, for example, to help keep your followers engaged and you on track building your following.
There are a lot of options available, including:
And you’ll find a lot of smaller, lesser-known options, too. The goal is to use these tools to keep your audience engaged.
What this doesn’t mean is that you get to forget about the engagement aspect of social media.
You need to keep engaging with your audience if you want to find success in the world of social media. No one is listening if you’re not making noise.
2. Engage With Your Followers
Followers need to feel special. If you ignore your followers, never post and never engage, there is no reason for your followers to stick around. It’s up to you to keep your audience engaged. It’s important for you to:
- Respond to follower comments
- Engage with followers via their posts
- Ask questions to your followers
- Answer your followers’ questions
If you fail at the basic task of engagement, your followers are not going to be valuable to you. Engaged followers are worth much more than followers that are a mere incremental count that you use to judge “effectiveness.”
3. Constant Updates Work Well
Every niche in the world has the potential to update their audience. Josh Pfeiffer does this masterfully on his social media accounts. We’ll take a look at his Instagram account to see what he is doing to build his audience.
Using Instagram, he is:
- Posting often
- Offering a look into his personal life
- Mixing in images and video content
- Utilizing hash tags (more on that in the next post)
You also need to find out when your audience is most engaged. There are tools, Buffer and Hootsuite offer them, that help you better understand your social media audience. If your audience is only “listening” between 9 am and noon, this is the time you want to post.
4. Hash Tags are Currency
Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk, has made a huge name for himself. I suggest everyone view his content. But one piece of content of his that made a lot of sense was that “hash tags are currency.”
He talks about a personal trainer that had a world of knowledge, but his social media following was miniscule.
We all know someone like this.
So, what he told this person to do is add 30 – 40 hash tags to each of their posts. And if you sit down and think about it, this makes a lot of sense. He equates these tags to currency because people are searching hash tags.
What happened?
The person grew their following to over 200,000 people. It works.
I have done this, too, and it works very well. Hash tags help people find your content. If you want people to find your content, hash tags are the absolute best chance you have. Hashtagify.me is a great resource for trying to make sense of hash tags and which ones to use.
These are just four small tips that can help you make a big impact on your social media following. I don’t want to overwhelm you when it’s hard enough to take action on any point mentioned.
So, start implementing these tips, refine them and see how they work for your social media following.
