Building a Brand that Engages and Delights on Social Media
In this day and age, social media is a crucial means of marketing your business. But it isn’t as simple as just creating profiles on social media platforms and letting the magic of the internet do the rest. You build your brand by implementing the best practices to increase social followers organically.
The online presence you build and maintain through social media is a huge part of establishing and developing your brand. It represents not just the quality of your product or service, but who you are as a business. The social content you put out into the world tells a story about who you are, what your customers can expect from you, and what sort of relationship they will develop with your business. At the end of the day, this story along with your brand’s social media personality will translate into results.
Here we’ll show you some of the best practices to increase your followers on social media organically (without any paid promotion). This process is based solely on the strength and strategy behind your use of social media.
The Personality Behind Your Company Brand
Why do you need to be active on social media for your business, anyway? Well, the sole purpose of your social media should be to utilize another avenue to connect to your current customers, potential customers, and future customers. Social media is a great way to highlight the personality of your brand and engage with people who are active on the various social platforms.
It may seem like the best way of doing this would be emphasizing what your business has to offer (such as promotions, sales, or information about your product or service). However, this is not always the case. Yes, those offerings should be included to some extent, but the main thing to focus on is how your brand’s personality presents online.
You want your brand to project positivity, to be engaged in the conversations, and to be welcoming through the points of view you post. This communicates the validity, strength, and character of your brand. You want to assure those who see your content that they are actually exploring, and connecting to, a business with a heartbeat. Your social media profiles need to be thoughtfully designed and thoroughly descriptive, creating an impression of a unique, authentic, lived-in space.
Substance, Strategy, and Consistency
These three points should all converge behind each social media post you create in the game of content marketing. Let’s break it down.
Substance
You can’t just post anything for the sake of keeping your social media channels up to date. There needs to be some thought behind these posts, something of substance that will truly engage your audience.
Create content tailored to your target audience. Make it visually striking, thought-provoking, comical, informative, etc. You need to capture their interest and draw them in. You also need to keep them coming back to all of your social media channels. Quality of content is a major factor in creating engaged followers.
Strategy
Different platforms are uniquely suited to different types of content. Familiarize yourself with the characteristics of these platforms and use them accordingly. Tweets are different animals than Instagram posts. The same is true of posting content on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Marketing on social media involves maneuvering different formats, to different ends, to create an overarching effect. This is how your marketing strategy generates results. How and what you post on each platform should involve some consideration of the bigger picture of your social media presence.
Consistency
As stated above, quality cannot be sacrificed for the sake of quantity. But the opposite holds just as true, if not more so. Your social media channels should always reflect a fresh cycle of recently shared content. In the war for attention that is the social media landscape, to post too infrequently is to be ignored, is to be forgotten, is to lose, is to not be relevant.
One way of ensuring that your social media activity is consistent is to make a schedule. This also helps with the strategic component, laying out what gets posted on which platform, and how these different channels promote content together to maximum effect.
Authentic, Enthusiastic Social Media Engagement
Social media is really all about one thing: socializing! This means engaging with your followers and others orbiting your social networks. First of all, you want to show that your social media accounts are not bots. Or that they’re monitored by some disinterested employee whose attention is elsewhere. You can’t be rewatching The Office on Netflix in another tab while comments on posts go ignored.
You need to engage with your followers, giving an authentic, human voice to your social media channels. Respond to questions and comments from your followers, comment on followers’ posts when appropriate, follow other pages and accounts, and interact with their content as well.
Follow & Share
Part of getting out there in “social media land” is following others and resharing their content. This is important for a few reasons. Often times, if you follow someone and engage with their content, they will follow you back. This is even more likely if you hold similar interests and concerns, or occupy the same niche.
You want to follow legitimate accounts that align with what your brand represents and can help to further your organic reach. There are resources to help you determine who to follow, both in terms of legitimacy, scope, and type of influence they have on social media. Influencer marketing is also on the rise. And sure, while that is an investment available to you, you can also follow and engage with influencers for free, potentially inspiring them to do likewise.
Hashtags
You know them, you love them. Use them when relevant in order to join a larger discussion, but don’t let them overshadow the content you post. If you’re looking to increase social followers organically, you’re gonna have to use those hashtags.
Increase Social Followers Organically by Cross-Promoting
Let’s get back to your marketing strategy. Remember, each social media channel you operate is part of the broader tapestry of your web presence. One key method of using each channel to benefit the whole? Cross-promotion.
Link your profiles to one another on different social platforms when possible. That way, you’re circulating your followers. Give them the whole scope of what your social media presence has to offer. Also, be sure to include links to social media pages and follow buttons in your emails, website, blog, etc.
Organic Social Media: It’s All About the Engaged Followers
The process to increase social followers organically can seem like a catch 22. When it comes to social media, in order to gain followers, you need to have followers. The more followers you have, the more likely a person is to click on that follow button. However, at the end of the day, the process all boils down to how you use social media to build a brand. More importantly, a brand that people want to engage with.
If your content marketing game is strong, people will begin to follow. At first out of curiosity… and then out of expectation. They’ll want more of the content only you can provide.
If you stay true to these best practices, you can keep the cycle moving in the right direction. Organic social media is not paying for placement, fairly uncomplicated, and, when it’s done right, it’s fun!
Mac Holmes
Content Writer and Editor
Mac at heartbrain dot marketing
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