20 Ways to Grow Your Social Media Audience Fast
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20 Ways to Grow Your Social Media Audience Fast
Lots of brands use social media every day as a marketing medium. However, many of them use it wrongly and have little or no social media presence.
With the competition being fiercer than usual, only brands with the right strategies can organically grow their social media followers and become more visible online.
In this article, we’ve highlighted 20 sure ways to grow your social media audience, increase brand awareness, and ultimately record a high ROI.
Did you know?  Now you can create cool business or profile names using our Social Media Business Name Generator. |
How To Grow Your Social Media Presence Exponentially
Follow these steps to grow your social media audience in no time.
1. Be strategic with social media choice
There are a plethora of available social networks, and it’s tempting to want to be active across all platforms. But you don’t have to. The aim is to connect with your users as much as possible, not to be awarded a trophy for being on all social media platforms.
An ideal step is to identify where your audience is most active. For example, if your target audience is majorly Gen-Zs, people between ages 15-25, you know that they’d be most active on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.
Recent statistics show that TikTok is now more popular than Instagram among Gen Z users in the US. It is the most engaging social media app, and even better, 24% of marketers considered TikTok effective for reaching their business goals, compared to just 3% in the previous year— a 700% increase.
| Get to know! What is TikTok?TikTok is a video-sharing social app that lets users watch, create and share short-form videos. |
For a B2B service, LinkedIn is your best bet. Different social media platforms work for different kinds of businesses. So, figure out which platform yields the most results and focus to create relevant content on it.
| Did you know? Focusing on one social media platform at a time allows you to find a sweet spot with your customers. |
2. Post content relevant to your audience
The next most important thing after knowing the ideal platform for your target market is to post content relevant to your audience. Your audience will stay with you only if they find your content useful, engaging, educating, informational, or entertaining.
One way to do this is to discover your customer’s pain points and create content around it. Content can be in any form. From images to audio, and video. Nothing is off-limits.
Another way is to pay close attention to patterns from your customer’s feedback. What are they screaming about? (Yeah, customers always have something to say).
Your content type largely depends on your social media platform. For TikTok, long-form posts are highly irrelevant and useless. For Instagram, you can do a combination of images, carousels, and videos.
At the end of the day, share content your target market wants to see, not what the Marketing Manager feels looks nice.
| Did you know? Producing content that will engage users is the most difficult content marketing challenge, according to 60% of marketers in the B2B industry. |
3. Link your social profiles to your website
An effective way to grow your social media audience is to link your social profiles to your website by embedding your social media feed on your website.
This way live photos and videos on your social media automatically appear on your website.
As website visitors see more engaging content on your website, they are glued to your content and follow you for more updates. This also increases the time users spend on your website.
Now, it is unlikely that all your site visitors will follow you on social media. But by displaying your social feed on your website, you increase your chances of getting more people to follow you. This number continues to increase over time as your website gets better at SEO.
This example from Hapag Lloyd Cruises shows you what your website will look like.
| Did you know? Consumers are six times more likely to purchase from a product page that includes pictures from social media. |
| Pro Tips Use social media handles that are similar to your business name to avoid confusion. You can generate ideas for your business name and social handles with Biznamewiz Names Generator. |
4. Engage with your audience
People like to feel seen, heard, and recognized. Don’t just put out content and hope that people will like it and magically see through your heart that your business cares about them. You need to show it.
Respond to comments on your posts, follow more people who follow you, feature customers on your feed, and acknowledge more people. When a customer tags or mentions you anywhere, respond to it. Ask questions to your community and watch how they react. Make them feel heard and seen. You may even organize offline events and watch your followers interact with one another.
This buzz creates a ripple effect that exposes you to more followers. Social Media algorithm recognizes posts with the highest engagement as relevant. So consider engaging more with your audience to stay afloat.
Here’s how Semrush engages with her audience by responding to their comments on each post.
| Did you know? Engaging with your audience leads to a 5X growth in social media presence. |
5. Engage with other accounts
The law of reciprocity works on social media as well. To grow your social media presence, you need to engage with other relevant accounts. Like, follow, and comment on their posts, and get involved in their activities.
| Get to Know! What is social media presence? Social media presence refers to how visible a brand is on social media platforms and how well they are connected to their audience on those platforms. |
The more engaging you are on their content, the more their followers notice you and follow you. Bear in mind that it isn’t always black and white like this. You may get a couple of followers.
But not everyone who notices you will follow you. Which is a normal experience, or else you’re Ronaldo or Messi or part of the Kardashian clan. This also isn’t a guarantee as none of these people have over a billion followers.
The goal, however, is to increase brand awareness which leads to audience growth over time.
| Did you know? Customers report spending 20% – 40% more money on brands that have interacted with them on social media. |
6. Host webinars and live sessions
A great way to grow your social media presence is to host webinars and live sessions where you share valuable or entertaining content. They are a good way to engage with your audience and let them know you’re listening.
You may choose to host a live session to unveil your latest brand ambassador, a new product, a new partnership, or to answer questions from your audience. You may also host webinars to educate your audience on the solution to their most common pain points.
Reach out to influencers or relevant public figures and have them educate your audience. People listen for two reasons; either the content shared is valuable, or they like the person behind it. Take advantage of this and provide valuable content by using your customer’s favorites.
| Did you know? 73% of B2B marketers said that webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads. |
7. Organize giveaways
Giveaways are another way to get more people to follow your social media accounts and be a part of your brand since everyone loves to get free things.
There are several ways to organize giveaways. You can ask your audience to answer a question, guess something on a post, create a caption, or record themselves doing something with your product.
You can even leverage football seasons and ask your audience to predict a match score and at the end of the match, you pick a winner. The winner then receives prizes from you. It could be a subscription plan, cash prize, or one of your products if you’re a B2C brand.
Semrush used giveaways in this post to get a new idea for their costume item. Here’s what they did.
| Did you know? Instagram accounts that hold contests grow their followers 70% faster on average than accounts that don’t. |
8. Use the right hashtags for your industry
Hashtags are as effective as content shared. It is one of the ways to find which keyword your audience is searching for.
An excellent way to find hashtags that suits you is to search for your niche hashtag on any social media network. For example, if your company manufactures cleaning detergents, you can search for “#cleaning” on Instagram.
| Get to know! What is the hashtag symbol on Instagram? Hashtags on Instagram are keyword phrases (with no spaces in-between the words) preceded with the sign #. It is used to categorize posts and make them more discoverable. |
Instagram’s search results show that this hashtag is very competitive with 7.4 million posts and a reel ranking first for it. So, it’d be difficult for your audience to find you. You need to search for other keywords relevant to your brand with less competition such as #cleaningmotivation, #cleaninghacks, #cleaningtips, #cleaningproducts, and #cleaningservices.
You also want to have a hashtag specific to just your brand that helps your customers easily find you.
Combining all these, your hashtag strategy should look like this;
- One branded hashtag e.g #XYZcleaningservices
- One highly competitive hashtag e.g #cleaning
- Less competitive hashtags e.g #cleaninghacks, #cleaningtips, #cleaningproducts, etc. There’s no limit to the number of hashtags to use but anywhere from 5 – 10 is fine.
It is important to note that using hashtags like #explore, #feed, #new, etc. does not increase your brand’s social media presence in any way.
So, figure out which content type works on your most preferred social network and combine it with the right hashtags to increase your social media followers.
Here’s a hashtag usage example from SEO Journal on Twitter.
| Did you know? Hashtags can increase your engagement by 100% on Twitter. |
9. Add social icons to your emails
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods to reach your target audience. It is 40x more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
You notice that some of your customers are on your mailing list, but do not follow you on any social media platform.
To solve this problem, add social icons to your emails and link them to your social media accounts. This way, customers can read your emails and follow you across all social media platforms.
This works better if you have a great product with a good market fit and solid customer service. Your customers will be more inclined to follow you everywhere because they enjoy what they get from you.
| Did you know? Email subscribers are 3.9x more likely to share your content on social media. |
10. Use eye-catchy visuals in your posts
It’s called social media for a reason. People engage and socialize with content, other people, and brands because they like what they see. Visuals are what gets social media running. The more things people share, the more engagement is recorded.
As a rule of thumb, use high-quality, eye-catchy, colorful images on your posts. Slowly do away with using regular graphics on posts.
Consider sharing images and videos of your staff and what working at your firm looks like compared to regular carousels or graphics. With tools such as Shutterstock, Getty images, and Canva, you can get access to stock images. Conversely, you can hire a designer or take the pictures yourself.
Here’s a cross-section of Apple’s Instagram feed
| Did you know? Visual content is 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other posts. |
11. Consistency builds social media presence
Consistency is key to building anything worthwhile, including your social media presence. Put out content, show up consistently, leverage community trends and keep sharing content. Posting consistently shows your audience that you’re active and they can reach you anytime.
The downside to this, however, is that you continuously need to create content. Whether reels, videos, carousels, images, etc.
To manage this, repurpose clips from webinars you’ve hosted, blog posts on your website, case studies, or reports your marketing team has worked on. You can also repost content from your audience, or start a generic conversation.
This way, you have more engagement. Which is the whole point of creating content, right?
| Did you know? Majority of marketers say they post on most social media platforms four to six times a week. |
12. Share content on trending topics in your niche
Leveraging trends is a great way to grow your social media presence because it creates more exposure for your brand.
For example, if you sell cleaning products, you may jump on trends like World Hand Hygiene Day. Post pictures of your products and how they can be used to keep healthy hygiene.
You can also jump on other humorous trends that don’t necessarily promote your product but spark engagement within your target market.
While leveraging trends provides results, know that you mustn’t jump on every trend, as your brand’s reputation can be at stake.
| Did you know? Trends are a good way to stay in contact with your customers. |
13. Optimize your profile for SEO
When you hear SEO, it’s normal to first think of Google optimization. But that’s not the case here. Optimizing your profile means making it easy for your customers to find you. You can optimize your profile in a few ways;
- Use hashtags on your post
- Upload a professional image or logo for your profile picture and ensure its the right size for the platform
- Add a few relevant keywords to your company description or bio
- Use the same image and handle across all social media platforms to enable your customers to easily identify you.
- Include links to your website, YouTube channel, landing page, and other pages you want your customers to see.
Starbucks maintained a consistent profile optimization in the image below. They used the same logo, description, and URL across Instagram and Twitter.
| Pro Tips Use social media handles that are similar to your business name to avoid confusion. You can generate ideas for your business name and social handles with Biznamewiz Names Generator. |
| Did you know? Over 200M Instagram users visit at least one brand profile page per day. |
14. Promote your accounts on other platforms
Growing on any social media platform comes down to three things;
- Sharing valuable content
- Engaging with your audience
- Promoting your posts.
This means that even if you engage and share valuable content, you need to promote this content to reach more people.
Promotion can mean running ads on your posts, reaching out to influencers for a shoutout, press mentions, etc.
Invest in social media marketing and have a budget for influencer mentions, shout-outs, and partnerships. This way you’re sure to cover more grounds.
| Did you know? Brand discovery from online sources comes through social media 52% of the time. |
15. Use more user-generated content (UGC) on your posts
Imagine social media content as having a conversation with a friend. It goes both ways because as you share stories, your friend is inclined to respond. This scenario also works on social media.
As you grow your brand presence by sharing valuable content, organizing webinars, live sessions, and giveaways, you need to share content from your customer’s perspective.
This may come in the form of organizing interviews for some of your customers and sharing their stories. It could also be discussing a prevalent topic in your industry with your customers and sharing the video online.
Whichever form you choose to use, UGCs serve as social proof and make it easier for new customers to trust you.
| Did you know? 46% of social media users will unfollow a brand for posting too many promotional messages. |
16. Use video content
The importance of videos in marketing cannot be overemphasized. 59% of marketers find video marketing to be effective for reaching their company’s overall business goals. It’s not enough that you explain it or write a post about it or design graphics for it, you have to show it. For most customers, seeing is believing.
With a good camera, you can shoot videos showcasing your products and services and share them online. Combine it with good images, descriptions, and music to grab attention.
When posting, upload your video or part of it to your social media platform rather than posting a link to it on another platform. This way, it automatically plays as your customers scroll through their feed. Leading to more views and engagement.
| Did you know? 4 times as many customers would rather watch a product video than read about a product. |
17. Spice things up with humor
Variety is the spice of life. It applies to social media as well. Sometimes, take a break from the regular strategy, to share funny posts and memes relating to your industry.
Humorous content helps your customers feel relaxed with your brand and feel connected to you because then you share in their laughter.
However, be careful to only share funny posts related to your field. For example, a career opportunity company shouldn’t be sharing memes about relationships or pets. Stay on brand.
It may be funny to your audience, but it contradicts your brand message and may impair your brand growth efforts.
| Did you know? The most effective content on social media is funny content |
18. Personalize your posts
Users engage with brands they feel connected to. This connection isn’t in organizing giveaways but in personalizing each post. Tell a brand story and make sure it’s relatable.
For every sport you take part in, Adidas provides you with comfortable sports gear, and not just that, they sell you a motivation that nothing is impossible.
Nike tells you to just do it. So they share personalized posts from athletes to inspire more people to get started pursuing their athletic dreams.
Apple encourages you to tell stories. Their social media page is full of content from people using their products to shoot various things. Beyond that, they encourage you to share your stories by showing you others who do so. They also understand that what people want to do is take the best pictures and videos using an iPhone. So they share tutorial content on how to do so.
Personalizing your posts helps you identify common ground with your customers and connect with them.
| Did you know? 42% of customers are frustrated by impersonalized content. |
19. Run ads on your posts
One of the most effective ways to grow your social media presence is to invest in paid advertisements.
Run ads on your posts to have a wider reach and increase conversion. Target people similar to your audience for your ads to help you reach new people.
As more people see your products, they are inclined to follow you to get more. If done well, paid ads can bring great returns for your products.
| Did you know? 49% of people in the 18-29 age range report purchasing something after seeing a social media ad for it. |
20. Offer solid customer service
Aside from email, call and chat, other ways customers can easily reach out to you is through your social media accounts.
Here’s the deal, your customers expect a Flash kind of response whenever they send a message on social media. Whether this is possible, isn’t something a furious customer wants to hear or analyze. They just want an ear to listen to their problems.
This is where you take advantage of the situation by offering excellent customer service. Invest in people, hire more customer support executives, or train people to be efficient customer support experts.
This way, your customers receive support for their problems and if satisfied can post about their experience on social media. This brings exposure to your brand and adds to your credibility record. So, when more people see they can get fast replies to their issues, they want to be a part of your brand. This, in turn, leads to more users, social media followers, and a large social media presence.
| Did you know? 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. |
To Wrap it Up
There you have it! 20 surefire strategies to grow your social media presence successfully. Go ahead to try out all the methods and discover what works for you. And when you do, continue to tweak it to find more ways to provide value to your audience.
Lots of brands use social media every day as a marketing medium. However, many of them use it wrongly and have little or no social media presence.
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