10 Tips for Growing Your Social Media Following

Do you sometimes feel you are having a one-sided conversation on your social media pages?

Are you building a community within your social media supporters?

Are you regularly engaging and sharing with them?

As you know, having engaged followers on social media is an important indicator of your influence. It’s a good way to get the social proof you need to sell your products, services and ideas. But you don’t want just any followers – you want a lot of targeted followers who are willing to engage with you and answer your calls to action.

In preparation for our first monthly #DWPBizBoost Challenge, today we’re sharing 10 tips to help with growing your social media following.

Share Unique High Quality Content

While your website should be the home where all your original and curated content lives, it must be promoted. One of the very best ways to do so is via your social media accounts. Sharing relevant content often is one of the surest ways to get more followers. If your content is unique, and high quality, your followers will share it too. Then, due to their sharing your content you’ll end up with even more followers who want to see more of what you have to offer.

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Share Your Connections’ High Quality Content

When you share other people’s content that is relevant to your audience, you not only give your audience more proof of your brilliance and ability to help them find the information they need, you also get the attention of the people whose content you shared. Many times they will take notice and start sharing your high-quality, unique content with their audience. Notice that to do this correctly, you don’t just share anyone’s content. You share only content that is relevant to your audience. Plus, it’s better if you share content from business owners who are not in direct competition with you, but who sell complimentary products and services to yours to the same audience as you.

Ask Your Partners, Current Customers, Vendors, Friends & Associates to Follow You

You already have people who have purchased from you, read your blog, and who associate with you on other channels. Ask them to follow you on all the other places you consistently share information. By telling your audience where to find you, and where they can connect with you, you’ll open up more opportunities for them to follow you. Create a special invite in an email newsletter that you send to each member of your audience, as well as to connections that might not be customers but who may know potential customers.

Set Up Share Buttons, Badges, and More on Your Website

Grab the code you need to set up the right buttons, badges, and links on your website so that it makes it easy for your audience to find you, follow you, connect with you. Use your contact page to place all the ways to contact you including your social media places as an additional spot to put this information. Don’t forget to add a Facebook “Like” box on any high traffic page sidebar. Don’t forget to add a Twitter badge and any other badge that you can get from your social media accounts to more than one spot on your website and blog. Multiple places help your audience connect with you easier.

Use Your Signature Lines and Bios

Naturally, you should include links to all your social media accounts in each email that you send out. Using your signature line to connect with people is the best way to use a signature line, including on social media networks that allow it. When you’re able to, you should put the links to your social media in any newsletter, direct mail, business cards, and other marketing collateral. You want to make it as easy as possible for your audience to connect with you, follow you, like you, and communicate with you.

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Link To Your Social Media

Whenever you can link to your social media through webinar thank you pages, eBooks, guides, blogs, you should. In addition, ensure that you cross-promote other social media accounts by promoting your Facebook on Twitter, your Twitter on Facebook, and so forth. By cross-prompting social media accounts you make it super easy for your audience to find you, connect with you and engage with you. The more you engage with people, the more followers you’ll get.

The following is an example of a magnet and bookmark that will be included in the attendees of our annual Celebration of Divatude’s gift bags. It includes how to find us on our three most engaging social media outlets and our main hashtag:

 

Don’t Forget Your CTAs

Other than creating relevant, unique and frequent content, it’s important to remember to always include a call to action (CTA). Whether that is to “Like” me, “Follow” me, “Answer” me, and so forth, it doesn’t matter. But, what does matters is that you include the CTA in all your emails, thank you pages, blog posts, eBooks, eReports, and more. Every time you communicate with your audience you have a chance to get them to act. Don’t pass them up.

Encourage Membership

We all like to feel special and receive exclusive information. Encourage membership within your social media accounts by having information shared only on one social media outlet, but share that they can access that exclusive information by connecting with you on that social media outlet. Make sure the outlet you’re sharing your exclusive information is one that you actively utilize on a regular basis.

Encourage Fans and Followers to Invite Others

Ask your current fans to invite others, and incentivize them to do so by offering prizes or other encouragement. Another way to encourage your current fans and followers to invite others is to have campaigns such as asking your customers to make videos or memes about what they love about your product or service and share it with their friends, family, followers and connections, as well as tag you in the process.

Engage With Others

Social media is nothing if not a place to interact and engage with others. On every social media account it is imperative that you engage directly with those who speak to you and to actively respond to questions and provide answers to those who ask. In addition, it’s important to comment on and interact with people on their own social media accounts too. Engagement is an essential component in making social media work for you and attracting more followers.

Understanding that social media is an imperative in online marketing today, and that the entire point of social media is to get more audience members (as well as to encourage your audience members to answer your calls to action) is your first step to making social media work for you.