Boost your follower count with real followers, honest responses and popularity like no other.
Do we have to tell you how important social media is? You already know how important it is. But do you know how to utilise and harness its power?
Running your own account is much more different than running your own business account, which is why this list of simple-but-effective tips will work wonders in promoting your business.
Write round-up blog posts
From whatever content has interested or enticed you and is related to your industry can be written up and summarised in a round-up blog posts that can go out every week, fortnight or month. Link back to the author where you can and tag them in your social media posts and you’re more than likely to get a response from them. If not the first time, share it on a regular basis on all of your social media and they might even share it on their pages too! Bigger audience = bigger traction.
Be yourself
Not like when you hang out with your friends, but for when you want to reach out to your audience on a personal level. Don’t just constantly share links to your content so much that your readers prefer to watch paint dry. Respond to their queries, have a joke every now and then, voice your opinions (so long as they don’t jeopardise your reputation) and move away from feeling like a robot churning out posts every week. This method of marketing is actually proving more popular than expected; getting on the same level as your customers makes you prove you understand their wants and needs has been shown to work.
Build a reputation
Some accounts take longer than others to build trust on. Some social media accounts use methods of their own (remember kudos on MySpace?) upvotes, likes, shares, favourites. retweets and reblogs all contribute to your online credibility. Although take this with a pinch of salt: the number of fake, spam accounts in contrast is worrying. Do you want quantity or quality? Sift out the bad accounts and focus on the ones that are ready to strike up a conversation with you, or at least retweet your stuff with a purpose in mind.
Hashtags work differently on each platform
A hashtag on Twitter is going to go further than a hashtag on Facebook because they’re used differently. As many use hashtags with the protection of a friend request it’s hard to determine what’s spam and what’s actually trending, but business pages can use it to promote their products and services. Keep them relevant to your niche or what your post is about and keep it simple, don’t overflow your posts with 20+ irrelevant hashtags just to gain a few more likes, no one will love you for it anyway. More importantly, look at what other businesses are tweeting about in your niche. What’s popular on Instagram might not be so popular on Pinterest.
Make it controversial, different, unique
Making content that invokes a reaction, that news companies do so well, can increase your audience reach even more than tenfold. The blue & black/white & gold dress debacle earlier this year reached 37 million hits from BuzzFeed thanks to a feeling of personal belonging; as everyone was talking about it online people felt inclined to join in on the debate as well.
As 1 in 4 people use social media around the world, with the total audience reaching 2.55 billion by 2017, social media ought to take precedence in this day and age, and what better way to do it than making quality content and interactions that will bring you contacts and leads as well as followers. It’s always a win-win. In short: less is more, quality over quantity.