Social platforms are the perfect media to create awareness of your brand, interact personally with your followers and influencers in your market, and learn more about the tastes and attitudes of your potential customers …because it gives you a direct marketing media channel straight to your chosen target audience.
And if you are ready to grow your social media audience, here are five essential ways to help you either get started or expand your reach.
Adapt the appropriate social media mindset
There’s definitely a certain mindset that you need to have if you really want to grow your audience on social media. That’s because the majority of the platforms, with perhaps the exception of the business to business site, LinkedIn, are social …fun, relaxed, and friendly. So, you need to be ready to interact by engaging in a positive way, and not just to set out promoting your product and service.
Instead, if you can be helpful to others without expecting anything in return, you’ll see much better results from your efforts. Hence the term: “Givers gain”. So, prepare to socialise and support others by getting into the right mindset each time you log in to your social media sites. That way you’ll become successful at building your audience.
Make sure you identify your key social media goals
It’s really important that you plan your key social media goals for growing your audience on social media and how these objectives fit into your overall business plan. Just because everybody’s seen to be on social media sites, doesn’t mean that you want to jump in and try it out without knowing what you need to do and how to do it.
Instead, have specific and measurable goals to direct every decision you make. For example, you may want to build relationships through social influencers and Facebook Groups, engage and nature your ‘community’ to drive them to your web pages, increase awareness about your brand, or you may want to build your business expertise on LinkedIn so you can provide other business with great information so they refer you products and services.
Really get to know your social media audience
Again, this is an important step in your social media planning because you need to have a good idea of what type of target audience you want to grow. So, define your target market in terms of demographics, attitudes and behaviours. Facebook algorithms is ideal for testing this and will duplicate you data findings with its Instagram platform. The benefits are that you can learn and understand your followers’ trends and tastes so you can create and share good content of value that will help and engage them and then offer solutions to their problems.
Engaging your social media audience
Engaging with your audience is the key to success on social media, after all, that’s what it’s designed to do. Which means you have to share great information content that your followers want to consume but also socially interact with. The types of content that gets them commenting, liking, and sharing such as images, photos, infographics, video, gifs, podcast, livestream, or a mix of different visual graphics.
Other ways you can increase engagement and build your followers by getting people to interact with you are by asking questions, conducting surveys, creating quizzes and presenting interesting challenges.
Be Committed to keep taking consistent action
You need to commit and see social media is a long-term business challenge if you want to get results. And what gets results is regular, consistent action. Which means you should be logging in each day to perform various tasks such as posting content, replying to messages, and answering comments.
And in order not to get overwhelmed by the vastness of social media, especially as your audience grows and they will expect you to be there interacting with them. So you need to decide and schedule how much time you’re going to spend every day and what tasks you’re going to perform during that time.
Having a social media plan as part of your business planning process will help you to create awareness of your brand online, socially engage with your target audience and build up your followers so they become potential customers who will then over time buy your offers and refer you to others,
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