Back in the early days of social media, it was very easy to get great engagement and reach. You could use simple things like social media images, videos, or business advertisements for absolutely free. Nowadays, social media platforms have made it harder for users to get decent organic engagement. Therefore, in most cases, it’s harder to grow social media pages or accounts without paying for sponsored ads.
Social media advertising can be very effective, especially if businesses correctly set up their advertising strategy. Building a following organically is 100% achievable. It also works out much better for businesses in the long run. There are many factors to consider when building a social media market strategy. Growing organically isn’t always something that happens quickly. However, by setting out an effective and consistent strategy, you can see your business’s social media channels thrive.
In this article, I’m going to cover 5 tips on growing your business’s social media accounts organically.
#1 Build a consistent strategy with value content
Consistency is key with any strategy. You need to organize your social media strategy. Ensure there is a consistent flow of content and activity on all of your social media channels. Depending on the social media platform, you’ll want to schedule at least 1-2 social media posts per day. We’ll discuss more on how to approach content scheduling for different social platforms later on. But for now, it’s important that you’re able to post at least 1-2 forms of content each day. This includes weekends. It will ensure your audience is regularly viewing or engaging with your content.
The type of content you post largely depends on your business and what you want to achieve with your social media strategy. However, when consistently posting organic content, you need to ensure you’re offering value to your audience. This is more than just advertising your business.
If your audience is constantly being shown ads for your business it can become a big turn-off. Your audience will be less inclined to engage with your brand. Whereas, when you’re regularly posting value, fun, entertaining content, your audience is far more inclined to interact with your brand.
So, your social media content strategy should be composed of more valuable and entertaining content rather than advertising. A good rule to follow is the “80/20” rule. Post 80% valuable content and 20% advertising content.
But what content should you be posting?
#2 Create evergreen content
I’d advise that your first step is to attempt to find and create evergreen content types. Content that you can use that always gets decent engagement. Finding the right content to post can be tough at first. Especially if you don’t yet know what type of content is going to attract and engage your audience. But evergreen content will help you remain consistent with your strategy. It reduces the stress of always trying to come up with unique content.
An example of evergreen content would be insights or statistics on a particular topic. For example, a marketing company could post daily insights into what marketing topics are trending. Then how they’re being best utilized. This helps businesses get a better idea of trending topics they could target in their strategy.
In that example, the content is offering the audience value. However, it’s also an interesting yet easy-to-create piece of content. It can also be regularly used. Take your time to experiment and find a handful of reliable evergreen content types. Things that you can use as part of your consistent social media strategy.
But please note, the type of evergreen content you use will probably change depending on the social media platform you’re using.
#3 Optimize content for each platform
This is fairly common knowledge between marketers, but content optimization often gets forgotten by many.
Optimizing content for each social media platform you’re using is incredibly important. While your brand messaging should remain consistent, your content needs to make sense within the context of each platform. The content you post on Twitter may not translate to Facebook users. The content you post on Instagram probably won’t make sense on YouTube, etc. Many people simply copy & paste their content across all platforms and expect the content to reach a similar engagement levels. But this doesn’t work in most cases.
So, the solution? Understand each platform you’re posting to, and either optimize a piece of content for each platform or simply create a different type of content for a particular platform.
For example, Twitter is largely text-based with people posting short, sometimes quick-witted paragraphs. However, Facebook is typically more visual, with photos and videos being the best performing content types. Where your text-based posts on Twitter may gain a lot of traction, the same text-based post on Facebook might not work as well as an image or video.
Also, when optimizing content, make sure all of your images are formatted in the correct dimension for each platform. Twitter image posts are formatted differently to Instagram and Facebook.
#4 Engage with your audience
A key to building an organic following is to actually engage with your audience, and even with other brands within your industry where appropriate. If one of your followers leaves a comment on your post be sure to reply to them as soon as possible! Speak to them like a human and not like a corporate robot that uses pre-written responses.
When you do this, you’ll make the follower feel more connected to your business — people love it when they know someone is listening to them, especially in this day and age where most people are spending a lot of time connecting with others online.
As touched on above, authentically engage with your audience and you’ll soon build a fan base that regularly engages with your content.
#5 Posting User-generated content
Building on the previous point of engaging with your audience, if you can harness the power of user-generated content, you’ll be able to quickly grow your online following.
User-generated content can be quite an in-depth topic, but we’ve created a guide on user-generated content to help you better understand what it is and how you can use it.
In essence, user-generated content is content that is created by your audience that refers to or mentions your product or service. This type of content is of huge value because you can simply report the user-generated content to your page, but also this type of content acts almost like a genuine testimonial for your business.
There are many reasons why you should look into making user-generated content part of your social media strategy, so I’d encourage those of you who want to learn more to start with our guide on user-generated content.
Building a Social Media Strategy that Works
It can take time to build regular engagement on your social media channels, but with a solid, well-planned, consistent social media strategy, you’ll be able to build a great following.
There are many factors to social media marketing that weren’t covered in this article, but if you want more information on building a successful marketing strategy, check out some of the latest posts on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James