Nowadays people using social media platforms will be all too familiar with the expression ‘followers’, regular accounts, business accounts or influencers often view the number of followers as an idea of the success of their channel/page. Having followers doesn’t automatically mean success straight away, it may take time to build a loyal following and gaining followers is an indication that your moving in the right direction to help achieve this. If social media is right for your business based on the industry you’re in, then it would make sense to build your following/presence online, as this is an opportunity to reach out to targeted customers, with an emphasis on relaying the message you want to, this will help build communication and more importantly conversion.

Start from the foundations

Today with more and more people signing up to social media, it is easy to mistake how important the fundamentals are, as setting up your account is on par with consistently managing it. What’s important to remember is continuity, there are several social media platforms out there today that will all benefit your business in some way or another, so ensuring your channels – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter accounts are branded with the right imagery or video throughout. Believe it or not, there are still new users/businesses that sign up to use social media platforms and fail to complete the descriptive parts of the social media page. This may be down to time constraints or leaving it on the back burner to fill in later and never get around to it. Nowadays it is all about the detail, Google amongst other search engines use the vast array of techniques to help funnel results to people who are looking for your services, so ensuring you complete as much information related to your business the better. Imagine stumbling across a Facebook Business page and seeing just a brand logo with no other details, who will they contact? How will they contact you? You may have a shop, where will they find you? As simple as this may sound, incredibly businesses still believe that operating with incomplete profiles is the way forward. In simple terms your setting up your business online and missing out information that will be crucial to building a customer fan base, and the opportunity for repeat custom, online reviews, social mapping etc. will be missed.

Ensuring your profile has all the relevant information and believing that no stone unturned is the best way to build your credibility and gain new custom. Search online for a business in any industry, see the difference with pages towards the top, and then filter to other pages that are way down the list, they’re down the list for a reason. Businesses today have to complete as much about themselves as possible to ensure any success online. This doesn’t just mean for your own website, but also completing information on review sites, back links, and business aids like Google My Business are all ways that can help build your brand.

Communicate

The key component of social media is communication, sharing your information, advertising your products are the first steps in building rapport with future customer engagement. When your products or services are in the community, it will be likely that you will receive comments, opinions both negative and positive. Here no matter what it is important to respond, acknowledge these comments in as professional manner as possible. Remember social media encourages communication, and the ability to read comments and opinions on your posts is one of the many reasons it does so well. Your comments as well as your customers will be visible to everybody, so it is important to remain polite, professional and be punctual with your comments. Good customer service is not easy to stumble across these days and adhering to these rules will go a long way in building your social media page and gaining followers. People viewing your content for the first time will also be impressed and prompted to follow you also. Managing the page with consistent content, engagement with followers also helps prospective followers as they have the reassurance that the page is up to date, informative, helpful and engaging.

Consistency

Being active is not rocket science, the more visible your page is the higher the chance of building engagement with new followers. Engaging with your followers via message/comment responding, is a great way to establish relationships with the people viewing your content, it is important to note that posting regularly will certainly help to. Here users will be able to see you’re a business that supplies relevant and helpful information, caring to go the extra mile to make your business accessible to all the followers on the internet. Being consistent with your posts and responses helps make followers aware you’re an active site that cares for their followers. Followers have been shown to leave should a page they wanted to follow become too stagnant in their approach with engaging with customers/ followers. If you haven’t posted in a while, it may prompt people to question exactly what benefit they get from following your page and cause them to look for information elsewhere.

Get noticed

In today’s world with competition online at an all-time high it is a lot easier said than done to get noticed in a highly competitive world. There a few tips and tricks that will certainly help you appear in news feeds and appear on the pages you want to be seen on. The first option is through paid advertising, this way you will be able to set aside a small budget to ensure your information will be seen on the social media platform. The chances of getting noticed increases, and you’ll probably gain followers and potentially conversions.

As well as the paid route which would involve some budgeting and expenditure there is also the organic route to get noticed too. I’m sure most will have heard of the hashtag, as this is a great way to promote your post or information you are sharing. Users can search by tags, and search feeds on social media platforms like Instagram display images related to those the user has looked at, all based on the hashtags. Throughout the Social media platforms there is a varying amount on the limitations of the use of the hashtag. As a simple rule of thumb, the more tags you use, the better your chance of your post being seen. As a word of warning, don’t go over the top with hashtags, try to use tags that relate to your content and your business.

Competitions

Competitions on social media is another great way to broadcast your presence online and gain some more followers. Although this ultimately means you will be giving something away, you’ll certainly reap the rewards and get a lot back in return.

Competition in news feeds is a regular occurrence these days on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. More often than not the competitions will encourage users to share posts with their friends so this would encourage them to enter the competition as well, the outreach here is by far greater. This entry requirement is commonly followed ‘follow our page’, by doing this you’ll be very likely to have a large increase of followers very quickly. Depending on the industry, competitions don’t always work in increasing brand awareness and gaining followers, as in certain industries they won’t work so well as others. Be sure to do some research first, ensuring it is right for your business, industry, brand or product or service.

Boost Followers via alternative Routes

Although we would recommend updating your social media accounts on a frequent basis , here you can boost your following, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to incorporate more hours on social media sites. There are other ways today where you can uptake that will see your social following increase. Linking to your social media pages via your website is a key place to begin. You could issue a ‘Follow’ button or an icon link, this way you are ensuring that you are providing a way for your website users to become followers on your social media sites.

Here, linking social channels can help grow your following. You can even have links in your Bio, or about me section that acts as a great way to let people know you are active throughout an array of sites.

If you have an email signature you can get your social media links in there too. The communication with your email signature involved is highly likely to be business related, this means that the user can still become a follower of your business. If you have a newsletter or run email marketing campaigns you can add links to social accounts, as these reminders to your viewers allows a great way to get users clicking through and following your pages.

Concluding

These are only a few ideas that will improve your business’s social following. There are plenty of other options to try, but we’d recommend these initial steps as a good solid starting point.

Nobody knows your business better than you do, and the vision you have for your business is one that can come to reality by following simple steps to help you get there. You may find other areas lead into more questions that would need answering, as technology and social media platforms continue to evolve, so to should your business and keeping up to date with changes in technologies is a sure-fire way to stay ahead of the competition.

Should you have any questions or need help with any of the information discussed in this article then please get in touch via our telephone number or email contact information. Alternatively fill in our online query form and we will get back to you.