Social media has become an integral part of a marketing strategy because the social space is where people are. E-commerce has become a welcomed business shift with businesses embracing the technology to foster business growth and profitability. Social media has proven to be a resourceful platform for marketing, sales, brand positioning and brand experience management.
Business happens when the connection is made with a prospect through the most appealing means. However, since social media has become a major means of communication among people, it has also become an effective connection and communication means for business.
For obvious reasons, influence is mostly measured by business followership and engagement across social media platforms.
We have curated 5 tips to help you increase your followership as a business on social media
- Optimize profile
How would you feel when you visit a brick and mortar office? Are you fascinated by how beautiful and attractive the office is set up? Do you love the kind of feeling you get from the smiling, energetic and ready-to-help staff happily waiting to welcome you? If those experiences can be nice, it can also be on social media too. Make your profile attractive. Use good, attractive and consistent brand colours. Let your bio pitch your business in the simplest language. Make your content well arranged to give a well-organized profile layout. People are always attracted to look, so leverage that in your social media profile.
- Be a follower
For you to be followed, you must first be a good follower. Research on relevant accounts to your business, look for the established ones and follow them across social media. It is not enough to follow, however, you would also need to consistently engage with their contents through your contributions. While you contribute, you become noticed and perceived as an authority. When you are seen as an authority, followers will start flooding in because trust is being built in the process. Be strategic with this, avoid spamming or giving unnecessary comment.
- Collaborate
Just like collaboration is a spice to business development, so it is online. Collaborating with account or brands in your business with more followers and authority can provide leverage that can increase your followership too. Partner with influencers and more established brands to promote your content. This is an easy thing to do online, meet any known influencer/brand, exchange value for promotion.
Other collaboration ideas are guest posting, conference, webinar and the most effective is through partnership content and campaign.
- Content
Content is the core of building expertise and trust online. Either you will be promoting to get followers or use organic means, it is still to be built around good content. Make sure your content offers value. People only relate to valuable content. Make sure it is aligned with your product and services so it will not be a difficult task for visitors to easily know what your brand is all about. Don’t just publish contents, publish high quality, engaging and consistent contents.
Optimize your content for search engine, use working hashtags and use mentioning for featured brands in your content – this will open you to more audience base.
- Share link
You don’t want to base all on social media, you can go beyond social media by featuring your social media link in other promotion used by your brand. Include your links in your blog content, traditional media and even in conferences and webinars you host or are invited to. If you have already built an email list through campaigns you must have launched, you can include your links in your regular newsletters to introduce your existing leads to your social media platform.
Beautifully written. especially the content part.
Everyone wants something engaging, your target audience needs something they can relate with, and that is what will always bring them back to your page.
Putting deliberate effort is however the key to all of these. Be deliberate, about what you want to post, why you want to post it, the type of audience you intend to attract and what you want to achieve.