Want to learn how to grow your social media following? You’ve come to the right place. Social media is undoubtedly one of the best platforms where you can:
- Reach new customers
- Establish yourself as a thought leader
- Promote content from your blog and drive traffic
- Discover more about your audience (market research)
- Increase online sales
The number of social media users has grown to 4.62 billion as of 2022, giving businesses greater opportunities to connect with their target audience.
Having a huge social media following will make it easier for you to reach your goals. Below, you’ll find nine ways to increase your followers consistently.
(In fact, UpViral can help you do it faster!✨)
How to Grow Your Social Media Following
We’ve got you covered with these simple and straightforward social media strategies.
Experiment with social media contests.
A social media contest is a campaign you do on a social media platform (such as Facebook and Instagram) where you encourage people to take specific actions so they can win a prize.
For example, you can ask them to join your email list and invite their friends to join for more chances of winning. Other actions can include posting a photo of themselves with your product to bring your engagement levels up.
Since you want to increase your followers, make sure that one of your actions includes following you on your social media platform of choice.
We’re proud to say that UpViral isn’t just a great tool for capturing more business leads. It can also be used to attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. 🔥
Here’s a success story: David Fraser did a 26-day UpViral contest which he actively shared on his Facebook page. While his main goal was to generate sales from his bunkies, he also wanted to grow his Instagram presence.
As you’ll see from the screenshot above, David set-up an UpViral custom action “Follow us on Instagram” worth 50 points. So, when contest participants arrived on his share page, they saw that custom action and complete it to increase their chances of winning!
The result? David got 2,546 new Instagram followers.
📖Read this article: How to Grow Your Social Media Instagram Using Viral Giveaways
Choose the right social media platform for your business.
Before planning your social media growth, you must know which social media platform works best for your business.
Truth be told, it’s challenging to maintain an active presence on all platforms out there. Your ideal customers aren’t found on all platforms either. How do you narrow down your choice?
Follow these tips:
- Do a contest and take note of the platforms that get the most number of shares. If people share your contest mostly on Facebook, that’s a good sign that your audience hangs out on Facebook! If you get lots of shares on WhatsApp, then be sure to take advantage of WhatsApp in your business.
- Create a short survey and send it to them in your next email. You can also embed it on a page of your website. Your home page, for example. Increase participation by offering a small thank you incentive, like an ebook or free training.
- Research your competitors. Find out which platforms they’re currently using. You can also note what they’re frequently posting on these platforms and how they’re keeping people engaged.
In addition to these tips, it’ll also help to check out which social media platforms are currently the most popular. This article by Search Engine Journal lists the top 10 social media platforms in 2022.
Get visual with your posts.
Adding a visual, such as an image or video, will improve the overall performance of your social media post. With so many distractions online, visuals make your content easier to understand. They grab attention, are shareable, and impact human emotions.
Studies show that presenting your visual content in a compelling way and showing how people can use your products will improve social engagement.
What kind of visual content should you post to help increase your followers on social media? Depending on your niche, topic, and campaign, you can try different things. For example, short video clips (I do this a lot on my Facebook page), memes, product photos, screenshots, and user-generated content.
Post content that excites your audience.
For a lot of marketers, there’s nothing more time-consuming than figuring out what to publish on social media. If you want people to discover and follow you, then you need to post something they care about.
Thankfully, you have plenty of options. Fill your social media content calendar with any of these ideas:
- Your business’s blog posts
- Behind-the-scenes images of your company
- A quick tip of the day that solves their problem
- An answer to a commonly asked question about your product or service
- One of your free resources (ebook, guide, tool)
- Inspirational quote related to your niche
- A customer spotlight feature or success story
- Fill in the blank post: “Today, I’m grateful for…..”
- Product review or testimonial
- The latest industry research
The key is to stay relevant no matter what you’re posting!
Yes, hashtags still work. Use them.
Regardless of the social media platform you’re on, take advantage of hashtags. Hashtags make it easy for people to discover content that interests them, which boosts the visibility of brands using hashtags.
You can use hashtags for different purposes. For example, if you sell fitness programs, the hashtags #fitnessprogram and #gymworkout will help promote your product.
If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you can use a branded hashtag, which combines the name of your brand and your niche/campaign.
Here’s how to grow your social media following using hashtags:
- Whenever you’re using a hashtag, make sure that it’s related to the topic you’re talking about. Don’t use something irrelevant.
- Search the hashtag before using it so you can see what other people or brands are saying in their posts.
- Find out which hashtags are popular. There are a lot of ways to do this, including checking Instagram’s autocomplete feature (see the screenshot below) and using a hashtag generator tool.
Form partnerships with influencers.
Influencer collaborations succeed when you can find someone whose interests align with yours. This will give you access to an audience that’s also interested in your brand.
You’ll also want to look at how many followers they have, the level of engagement they’re getting, and whether you can actually afford them.
Lesna, a platform in Romania that organizes contests and giveaways and has recently used UpViral to generate 12,677 leads, has shared their influencer partnership strategy:
- They target influencers with less than 50,000 followers. According to Lesna, influencers with this follower size tend to be more responsive to partnership requests.
- Whatever your campaign is about, always be transparent with the influencer. For example, you need to tell them the value of your offer and how they can benefit from partnering with you. This establishes trust in your relationship.
- If you’re doing a giveaway, it’s also a good idea to partner with an influencer who does giveaways and is well-recognized in the industry.
Even if your influencer partnership campaign goes well (at least on the surface), it’s still important to look at the data. How many new social media followers did that campaign actually generate?
🤓UpViral Tip: You can assign a UTM parameter to the links you provide to an influencer. By doing this, you’ll be able to track how much referral traffic an influencer is driving to your campaign.
Actively engage with them.
Some businesses use their social media accounts as a place where they can “advertise” their products and services. Having this kind of mindset can make you impersonal and less approachable.
Remember that social media is all about community-building and engagement. Therefore, be proactive in responding to comments (both positive and negative) and encourage discussions.
This has benefits that go beyond greater social media growth. It can help you identify opportunities for improvement in your product or service. Moreover, you’ll stand apart from other businesses that aren’t as engaging and responsive as you are!
Final Thoughts
All the tips above are instrumental in helping you attract more followers on social media. It takes effort to catch people’s attention and convince them that you’re worth their while, but with consistency and a proven tool like UpViral — you’ll reach your goal in no time.
