How To Get More Followers On Social Media?

Did you know that most of the businesses that thrive on the internet have a healthy presence on social media? The days of simply creating a website and waiting for prospects to discover it are long past. There is cutthroat competition in every niche. You need to reach out to your prospects to boost your business, and there is no better way to find your target audience and promote your business than on social media. To develop your presence on any platform, you need to understand how to get more followers on social media and hold their attention with your posts. But before we get to that, here are a few important facts.

More than half the world population has a healthy internet presence. And over 93% of those are active on social media. It implies that you can, in theory, take your business to nearly 4 billion real people from the comforts of your home. Many businesses have already generated considerable revenue through social media exposure, but there are many more that are yet to make a mark. There are a fair few who aren’t even trying! So you have a great chance of taking the realm of social media by storm.

How to Get More Followers on Social Media

The first and the most important step to developing a healthy presence on social media is to amass a considerable number of followers, not fake followers but real ones. Your followers are like your sales leads. The more leads you generate, the greater will be your chance to get potential customers. Similarly, the more followers you have, the better your business will run on social media. There are three basic rules to increase your follower count and accomplish your social media goals on any platform.

• Post Quality Content

It is not without good reason that content is considered to be king on social media. People flock to social media to find valuable content, something that tugs on their positive emotions of inspiration, strength, intelligence, laughter etc. If your user-generated content generates any of these emotions within the audience, then you will get more followers.

• Consistent Engagement

Another big reason why people are attracted to social media is the numerous socializing opportunities it offers. If you are known to engage with your existing and potential followers consistently, you can expect a rapid rise in the count. Don’t forget to keep track of your engagement rates on the platforms.

• A Stellar Bio

They say that you should never judge a book by its cover, but that is exactly what most people do. If you have an attractive bio, profile picture and stuff, chances are that your business will get noticed better, leading to an increase in your follower count.

A point to note: before you can begin to increase the number of your social media followers, you need to choose the right platform to promote your business.

Choose the Right Social Media Channels to Get Followers

There are many types of social media channels in the market. A new channel is added almost every month! But not every platform is right for each kind of business. For instance, you can’t expect a creatively aligned channel like Pinterest to boost your technically focused business. That said, people have found ways to bend the channels to their business’s benefit. Did you know that several engineering firms thrive on Pinterest and a number of artistic entrepreneurs are popular on the technically inclined LinkedIn?

Either way, it is always better to start off with the right social media channel that is specially created for your niche. Your business will find it easier to spill into the non-related channels later. Here, we help you choose the perfect social media platform for your business among the most popular ones.

• Facebook

With nearly 3 billion active users monthly on Facebook, it is the leading social media website in the world today. And the good news is, it can cater to almost any business that you can dream of. Currently, the top niches thriving on Facebook are education, management, finance, technology and travel.

• YouTube

From all the video-focused digital platforms, YouTube generates the most number of views. Gaming and animation, cooking, technology, beauty and fashion are in high demand on the platform. But is there any business that cannot be promoted via video? From the abstract to the real, technical to artistic, popular to niche, literally, anyone can promote their business on YouTube!

• WhatsApp

For the meme generation, there’s no better place to promote their business than WhatsApp. With nearly 2 billion monthly active users, the sky is your limit. The platform is ideal for rendering quick customer service. And it is also perfect for the human resources department to recruit the right candidates for their company.

• Instagram

In a time governed by technical businesses, there came a platform that specially catered to artists. Instagram was initially focused only on photography. But over the years, it has evolved to incorporate almost every business known to humankind.

Essentially, any social media channel can be used to benefit your business. You only need to understand its user base and think up new ways to accommodate their interests.

Optimize your Social Media Profiles

Once you have selected the right social media channel for your business, it’s time to optimize your profile. This is one of the many ways to know how to get more followers on social media for your business. It helps you reach the right kind of audience while also ensuring that you convert them into a sale.

• Quality Posts

People are attracted to quality, not quantity. If you have a high follower count but you don’t post quality visual content, chances are that you will steadily lose your followers. So the first thing that you should focus on to increase your followers on social media is to ensure high quality of your posts. In crasser terms, you need bait to attract fish. And the perfect bait in social media waters is quality content.

• Engagement

Once you have enough followers, it’s important not to lose them. That is where engagement comes into the picture. The best way to optimize your profile is to keep your existing followers coming back for more. Keep an engaged community of customers. Only then will they share your content and increase your follower count. A pro tip: create a branded hashtag to keep track of your brand’s engagement or use professional analytics tools for the same.

• Persuasion

Now that you have them hooked, it’s time to reel them in. Add a call to action to your posts, something that leads them to your website and buy your products or subscribe to your services. For instance, if you’re posting about your wellness products on Instagram, type something like this in the caption, “Head to our website to save a ton on your first purchase (followed by a link to your website).”

• Customer Service

This is the most important part of your optimization process. Without quality customer service, all the previous optimization techniques are as good as waste. Got your first new customer via social media? It’s time to ensure they are satisfied with your product or service so that they are here to stay, and also so that they might recommend new customers to your business. Thankfully, social media provides amazing ways to interact directly with your customers. There are posts, comments, forums, direct messages (DM), and so much more!

This is all you will ideally need to increase your follower count on social media. Hereafter, you may choose to heed the following tips to get even more followers on your chosen platforms.

Drive Traffic from One Platform to Another

Many internet users may be active on social media, but they aren’t concentrated on the same platform. Given the most recent statistics, most of them are clearly on Facebook and YouTube, but there is less than half the number of social media users on other platforms. And it’s not like if they aren’t active on Facebook, they will be socializing on Instagram and YouTube. They may be active on some obscure channel altogether.

Boiled down to its essentials, your clients are spread across multiple social media platforms. Your Instagram followers might not know about your Facebook page. The good news is that there are several ways to let your customers on different channels know about your presence on other platforms. You can use the official tool to connect your accounts, like the Meta Business Suite, or you may use third-party apps for the same. Alternatively, you can also add links to your profiles on other platforms to your posts or bio.

Be a Follow-Worthy Brand

You might be selling the best products in your niche, but does your target audience know that? How can they understand that your brand is worth checking out? If you wish to know how to get more followers on social media, you need to make your brand follow-worthy. Show them that your brand is worth following by attracting their attention with your best products and services, let them know what makes your offerings stand out from the competition, and post shareable content on your SM channels, something which they could easily relate to.

Watch the Competition

Trust your employees, but don’t expect every good idea to come from them. Your competition may also brainstorm great ideas from time to time. Keep an eye on them, and if they are inching ahead of you, try to figure out what they are doing differently to increase their current followers. Incorporate their idea into your own campaign and do it better than them!

Use Automation

Amidst kickstarting a new project or clearing backlogs, can’t you find the time to handle your social media account? Automation will come to your rescue! Why let your booming business from your social channels slow down when you can simply automate the process? Schedule posts according to your social media content calendar, automate detailed report creation, set up auto answers to the most frequently asked questions, track your brand’s popularity using relevant hashtags, and so much more.

Promote Your Social Media Accounts

Social media users don’t just accidentally discover each other’s accounts. They need to know about a brand to search for it on a platform. And when nobody knows about your business, let them know. Start by promoting your social media accounts to your friends and acquaintances. Move on to promoting it on other social networks and forums. Let your business snowball from there into a well-known brand.

Be Proactive in Listening to and Responding to Your Online Community

People appreciate it when a business takes the initiative to address their concerns. When you notice a drop in your brand’s ratings, check for specific reviews that have rated you low, and try to point out the problems. Your first step is to respond to those negative comments and assure them that their problems will be fixed. Then, fix those problems!

Establish Your Social Media Voice and Tone

When you begin your social media journey, it is important to set your business’s voice and tone on the platform and stick to it throughout. How would you personify your brand? What types of content do you specialize in? Do you want to connect with your audience as a friend or in a professional manner? Would you rather have people call you factually oriented or intimately inclined? Are your posts more sarcastic than serious?

Make Use of All the Formats

Each social media platform has a number of content formats. Not one has just one. For instance, in Instagram, you can create your content in image format, video format, Instagram stories or Instagram live formats. And don’t forget the captions! Utilize all the available formats in the platforms to get the best out of your social media strategy.

Repurpose Popular Content

As mentioned earlier, you don’t always need to brainstorm unique ideas to gather more followers. Another great way to attract new followers to your account is to post content that is already trending in the community. But add your own special flavor to make it unique and meet your growth goals in a short time. For example, let’s say a ‘cat eating a ball’ video has gone viral. You can edit the video to show that the cat is eating your brand’s logo!

Publish Great Content Consistently

The consistency with which you update your social media profile with new content matters as much as the quality of the educational content. So far, if you have been posting every week, but have recently failed to post for two weeks in a row, then your followers may lose interest in your business, leading to a drop in the number.

Do Your SM SEO

One of the best ways of letting people know about your business is to optimize your social media posts for search engines. Want to know how to get more followers on social media without direct marketing? Let search engines do the job for you. Include the right keywords in your content, add alt-text to images, upload closed captions to your videos, use location tags etc.

Give Paid Ads a Go

Free ways like SEO and social media marketing can only get you so far. Sometimes, they may not even work due to the high competition in your niche. Consider shelling out some money to expose your business to the right people on social media. Try out paid promotions which display your account and content to a huge audience. Keep a lookout for attractive discount codes on various coupon websites to get a great deal on your paid ads.

Use Social Media Management Tools

Have you implemented all the above tactics and started your journey across multiple social media channels? Handling a single social media account can prove to be a tough ask for some. Managing multiple accounts is overwhelming for many. Consider signing up for a social media management tool to ease the process. Basically, it is a platform that lets you access and manage your accounts across multiple social media channels. For instance, if you want to schedule the same post for both your Facebook and Instagram accounts, you can use the Meta Business Suite’s scheduling tools to do so.

Conclusion

Have you put all the above techniques into action? If yes, you must have already started amassing a steady stream of followers by now. If not, don’t lose hope. Most thriving businesses weren’t built in a day, and the process of increasing your follower count on social media is generally a long one. Be persistent, keep at it, and you will certainly get there one day. But if you still want to get more organic followers in a short time, try SimplyGram, an organic Instagram growth service that can attract thousands of followers to your account in no time!