How to grow your social following

Growing your following on social media can be challenging.  Of course you can spend money on ads to grow your following but there are lots of things you can do to grow your following organically.

We had a great discussion around this in our recent #SocialTalkLIVE session where we have fun talking about social media tips while wearing hats and wigs.  Yes, it’s a bit weird but it’s on Friday afternoons so we have to get a little crazy 🙂

Here are some of the tips we mentioned.

#1 Post interesting content

This is the biggest one.  If you want to grow your following, make sure you are posting things that get shared and things that spark engagement.

Share interesting content

When you have a post that gets a lot of shares, you will also get organic Likes.

Organic Likes

 

Using humor works well.  I recently posted a funny gif that got a lot of shares and resulted in a lot of new Likes. While people can feel like humor isn’t relevant to their business, it is still a big reason people are on social media – to have a little fun!

 

Post funny content

Find some places that share humorous posts to inspire you.

Remember that when your mantra on social media is:  Entertain – Enlighten – Inform, you will grow.

Phyllis also suggested using the LinkedIn Pulse editorial calendar to create content that matches with what they will be promoting during that time.  Your content will then go farther.  Great tip!

 

#2 Connect to your Warm Audience

People who already know you may not be connected to you on your social sites.  So use things like the People You May Know tools that are available on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

People you may know tool

You can also use a tool like Discover.ly which is a Chrome plugin to tell you how to connect to people.  It works in your e-mail system to show you their social sites and you’ll find out how to connect to them.

Discoverly

#3 Use Hashtags

Phyllis has some great tips around this whole topic including her 9 Steps to Research a Hashtag Checklist.  Hashtags can make your content go farther.

And we recently had a #SocialTalkLIVE conversation about this called 3 #Hashtag Tips for Small Businesses.

Using Hashtags can help your reach and help you connect with people who are talking about your key topics.

And during the conversation we also talked about the research that Buffer did around the ideal number of hashtags to use on each platform.

We had lots of other great tidbits but you need to watch the video to get them.  I also mentioned this recent post that gives some more tips around growing your following:https://www.andreavahl.com/social-media/3-tips-to-grow-your-followers-on-each-social-site.php

 

Social Following

So we hope that gives you some great ideas.  How about you, what is your favorite way to grow organically?  Share your tip in the comments below!