Social media can be one of the quickest ways to create brand recognition and lead traffic to your company site pages. The belief is that the more followers you have, the more opportunities your messages will have to impact people. However, it can be tricky to figure out what to do to grow your following on social media.
We understand that it can be frustrating when you work so hard to create and share content but you are not seeing your numbers increase. Your total followers, your engagement numbers and your shares may not grow. Thankfully, we can help.
There are a few strategies that can greatly enhance your engagements and your follower numbers.
Here are 5 tips that will help increase your following on social media.
1. Answer Important Customer Questions
It is easy to get caught up in writing about ourselves. We want to share our value proposition, our case studies and why customers should use our product or services.
But, just like in real life, if you talk about yourself too much then others tend to close their ears. In content and social media, it means they ignore your posts.
An easy way to help ensure your content is relevant and important to your customers is to create content that answers their questions.
Ask your team members to document common questions that are asked and use those to guide your content.
Be sure to include your customer success team, your tech support teams and of course, your sales teams.
If your team members can identify common questions, then it is likely that other prospective customers will also have those questions.
When your content is addressing questions they already have with quality answers and insights, it makes your company seem more relevant. Readers who gain value from one post are more likely to read other posts in the future and will subscribe.
2. Create Customer-Centric Content
Similar to tip #1 above, use your content to help your customers grow their businesses or lead their personal work effort.
Often the best customer-centric content is content that addresses their challenges or problems they may encounter in the near future.
One strategy that we have used is to interview our prospective customers and ask them what challenges they are facing.
We use a simple formula to ask our clients these 5 questions and then use the answers to create valuable content to help them:
- What are you goals for the next 12 months?
- What are you currently doing that is helping you reach your goals?
- What are you currently doing that is NOT helping you reach your goals?
- What do you NEED to achieve your goals?
- What is frustrating you the most in trying to achieve your goals.
Here is how it can work for you.
When you interview customers and get these answers, you know the type of content that will help them. If tailor your content to help them solve their challenges, they will continue to pay attention.
You can phrase your answers to help establish your company as a valuable source of quality information.
For example, you may write content that starts with,
“If you are like most (name your customer title here) your goal for the next year is __________ . What you are currently doing that is helping you achieve your goal is _________ . But, what you are doing that is NOT helping you achieve your goal is ___________ . You need ____ and _____ to accomplish your goals and your biggest frustration currently is __________ . “
If your answers are accurate and insightful, your readers will find your content relevant because you understand their challenges and pains. They will want to continue listening to your answers and your followers will grow.
3. Be Consistent
Often the biggest challenge with social media and content marketing is consistency. The best way to be consistent is to have someone on your team responsible for your plan.
By creating a plan and building a strategy to create content and social posts and make someone on your team’s role to ensure consistency.
You’ll also want to establish a good content creation system. You can either include your team members so they can actively create content or you can hire content creators. Or, do both.
The key is that you have a team, a plan and a system, to create and publish on a regular basis.
4. Use Hashtags
Using hashtags gives you the ability to expand your reach and introduce your content to new readers. Be sure to research the right hashtags so that you are communicating with their right audience.
Research and discover the hashtags that resonate most with your audience, creates the most engagement and interactions.
Look through hashtag trends and see who is engaging, sharing and posting that content.
It can give you a clear insight into the audience that uses those hashtags to discover community.
5. Amplify through Your Team
Did you know that content that is published or shared by individuals is much more likely to be shared, engaged and create traffic to your site?
A study reported by Simon Kemp on LinkedIn found that when a post was shared by a person, rather than a company, the posts were
- 3x more trustworthy
- 8x more engaging
- 24x more likely to be shared
- 7x more conversions.
Social media is about connecting with people. Business has always been done between people. Therefore, social media is an excellent modern tool to connect businesses to people.
We have found that it is much easier for people to comment and engage with posts that are published by a person rather than a company. We believe there is something in human nature that compels us to want to engage with other people.
The challenge with getting your team to share your posts is that they are very busy doing their own jobs. It is hard for them to take time to login, find the post, think of something valuable to write and then share it. What’s more is that all that effort is just for one social media account. What about the individuals who have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram? That immediately makes it 4x the effort just to share one company post.
FunnelAmplified is a social amplification solution that empowers marketers to share posts with every member of a team.
Anchored by our easy-to-use mobile app, your team members get a notification on their phone. Then, with just a few taps of their screen they can easily SHARE your posts to their personal social media accounts.
It is easy for marketers to provide and every team member is always in control of what they actually share to their personal accounts. It is a great win-win.
In fact, we believe in our system so much that we will offer it to you for free. Our freemium program is 100% free and we never ask for your credit card.
Want to give it a try? Click Here and start amplifying your posts for free with your team today.
Thanks for reading. I typically write about modern selling, virtual selling, prospecting, sales reps reputation and how content helps all of these with modern buyers. My primary audience includes CEOs, CROs, CMOs, and other executives responsible for increasing bottom line. Post your questions in the comments section below and let’s discuss this!
