Social media is excellent for growing your brand, starting a business, or even launching your career as an influencer. That’s because these platforms have the potential to reach billions of people. Think of each person as a potential customer. That means every follower on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook is a potential customer.
So that presents a challenge where brands and influencers rush to grow their social media followings. However, doing that is challenging, as everyone would have thousands of followers otherwise.
But we’re here to tell you there are ways to do that. This article will outline the eight tips to grow your social media followers. So, let’s begin.
Find the Right Social Media Platform
The first tip involves doing some groundwork. Social media platforms all excel at one thing – connecting you with like-minded individuals from all around the world. However, different platforms have different communities.
For example, LinkedIn is a platform for professionals, while everyone from your grandmother to prominent company executives uses Instagram. Moreover, managing and selling products and services are done differently through these platforms.
You can set up a Facebook page and use the Meta Business Manager analytics to track sales, traffic, etc. To explain in more detail, here is what you need to know regarding the most popular social media platforms:
- Facebook is ideal for driving website traffic.
- Twitter is ideal for promoting website content.
- Instagram is ideal for creating a strong brand identity.
- LinkedIn is ideal for professional networking.
So first things first, research the benefits of each social media platform and what it offers to your brand or business.
Optimize Your Social Profiles
Once you’ve done the groundwork regarding the social media platforms you want to use to grow your brand or business, creating and optimizing your social profiles is the next step.
You do this to make your profile easily discoverable. So, here is a checklist to follow:
- Upload your logo, professional photo, and even videos to showcase your brand or business.
- Write a short bio explaining who you are or your brand. Make sure to include relevant keywords to increase discoverability.
- Make your profile handle short and similar across multiple platforms.
- Include website links and links for other social profiles for added visibility.
- Use colors relevant to your brand and business for branding purposes.
Start Networking
The biggest challenge when growing your social media following is knowing where to start. These platforms offer numerous mechanics that allow us to connect with like-minded individuals.
Networking on social media gives you the best chance to connect with your ideal target audience. So, start following relevant accounts. Doing that also allows you to engage with the people you want as followers.
Finding these accounts might initially be challenging. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few clever ways to quickly find relevant accounts:
- Join groups and communities on Facebook and LinkedIn to discover highly-relevant accounts. Make sure to contribute regularly to these groups to increase brand visibility.
- Create a list of known accounts similar to your niche. Then, follow them to gain access to their followers. As a side note, DO NOT follow or comment on competitors’ posts; this increases their visibility.
- Search relevant hashtags on Instagram and TikTok to find accounts related to your industry.
Interact Regularly With Your Followers
You might think of yourself as a big fish, but even the biggest social media influencers regularly interact with their followers. So that means you have to do so as well.
Interacting with your followers helps you build a community. The more you interact on social media, the more you increase visibility. However, there are correct and incorrect ways to interact on social media. Here are several tips to help you start:
- Engage in conversations; ask questions, share opinions, and reach out to others to initiate conversations.
- Be helpful; answer questions, solve problems, respond to inquiries, and provide recommendations.
- Thank them for sharing your content and regularly commenting.
These are some ways you can interact with your followers on social media. Remember that the goal is to create a community where everyone’s opinions are equally valued. In addition, interacting with followers turns followers into brand advocates, which helps grow your follower count.
Create High-Value Content
Creating high-value content is another important way to grow your social media following. In addition, it helps build your brand. Building your brand involves creating unique content and staying true to your brand identity.
Through high-quality content, you can effectively attract new followers, engage with existing followers, and build relationships with potential customers.
The key to creating high-value content is to understand your target audience. The more you know your audience, the easier to create high-quality and sharable content.
Additionally, leverage the use of graphics and visuals. Graphics and visuals are excellent for boosting engagement on social media, as the right image or video can drive social media interaction and attract new followers.
Use Humor to Engage
There’s no better way to create sharable and highly engaging content than through humor. Luckily, we live in a time when memes on social media are commonplace.
Humor, fun, and memes can help you gain followers on social media. Whether you’re running a business or personal account, funny and relatable content can be a great way to engage with your audience.
As they say, humor is a great way to break the ice. So make your followers feel comfortable when interacting with you. But there’s a line you absolutely cannot cross.
Namely, never post funny pictures just for the sake of it. You should only post relatable content that connects with your audience’s interests. Doing that helps you build relationships quickly.
As a pro tip, post memes and encourage your followers to tag their friends and family. So, put “Tag someone who needs this” in the description of a funny video to encourage them to invite new people to your social media profile.
Create Giveaways and Contests
Running giveaways and contests is a great way to increase engagement and grow your social media following. Giveaways help to drive followers to your accounts while also giving them a chance to win a prize.
Creating themed giveaways relevant to your brand and niche is a great way to draw attention and get people talking.
Furthermore, partnerships with other businesses will help increase your giveaway’s reach and make it more appealing to potential followers.
However, you must run giveaways and contests the right way. Ideally, you want to use them in the best possible way to reap the most benefits. But on the other hand, creating a bad giveaway or contest will achieve the opposite.
So, what are the benefits of running a successful giveaway or contest? First, giveaways and contests increase traffic. Moreover, a successful giveaway means you’re likely to gain new followers, as one of the rules of the giveaway or contest must be for people to follow you.
Second, the more people enter the giveaway, the more engagement to your social profiles. And lastly, more engagement means more visibility.
There’s really no downside to running giveaways, and you should do them as often as possible.
Manage Social Media Accounts Through Automation Tools
Growing multiple social media accounts simultaneously can be tricky. Well, what if we told you it doesn’t have to be? The great thing about social media, in general, is that there are plenty of third-party management tools for automation and simplicity.
These tools make the life of social media managers much easier and can make your life easier too. In addition, these tools can actually help you grow your followers. While not every tool will do that, as some are specifically designed for running different aspects of social media, it’s important to familiarize yourself with these tools nonetheless.
Luckily, we have a guide on the 15 best social media management tools for business that leverage the power of automation to make growing your social media following easier.
Best Practices to Grow Your Following On Different Social Media Platforms
Let’s talk specifics. Social media is a broad term that encapsulates dozens of platforms, all different in their approach to follower growth. So to better understand how to grow your social media followers, we must mention specific best practices for each platform.
No other social media platform is better at driving referral website traffic than Facebook. Facebook was the first to create the idea of sharing content, posting on your friends’ walls, etc. While it isn’t the first social media platform, it is one of the most popular, with 1.7 billion daily active users.
Here are the best practices to grow your social media following on Facebook:
- Join groups and become a regular contributor.
- Create a page and invite people to like it.
- Upload videos instead of YouTube links.
- Post consistency at optimal times to reach the most people.
- Run Facebook Ads.
Brands with strong visuals love Instagram. The platform operates differently from Facebook, despite being part of the same parent company – Meta. Instagram is also excellent for authenticity and dislikes the “sales” approach to growth.
Here are the best practices to grow your social media following on Instagram:
- Use relevant hashtags and location tagging.
- Don’t overuse hashtags, as Instagram might limit your reach.
- Post strong visuals (images, videos, and stories).
- Be inspiring and entertaining. People love Instagram because it’s fun; they don’t like the salesman approach.
Despite having significantly fewer daily active users than other social media platforms, Twitter is the social media platform where people go to their news and gossip. So your approach has to be different.
Here are the best practices to grow your social media followers on Twitter:
- Use relevant hashtags.
- Post regularly (around 15 tweets a day).
- Interact regularly; use Twitter spaces to connect with your audience.
- Run giveaways and contests.
The so-called social media platform for professionals, LinkedIn excels at connecting you with entrepreneurs, executives, and important decision-makers from all across the world and all industries. People come to LinkedIn to be serious and professional, and it’s not the platform to share memes or use humor. Instead, you need to create informative content that professionals will find informative and useful.
Here are the best practices to grow your followers on LinkedIn:
- Create high-quality and informative content.
- Join and share conversations to build a strong community of professionals.
- Stay on-brand; post branded and professional content.
- Network with leaders and professionals to increase your brand visibility.
TikTok
TikTok is the new kid on the block. While many thought TikTok would be just another video-sharing app, it’s become a prime target for companies and digital marketers. That means more people are interested in growing their followers on TikTok.
Here are the best practices to grow your followers on TikTok:
- Create trending content; TikTok’s algorithm favors videos created with trendy sounds.
- Use trending hashtags.
- Duet with other users, influencers, and professionals.
- Participate in “hashtag challenges” and trends.
- Most importantly, have fun!
Snapchat
Although Snapchat isn’t talked about as much, it is still one of the biggest social media platforms, with 480+ million daily active users. Users on Snapchat allow snaps to be viewed only for a certain amount of time before they disappear. So if you want to grow your Snapchat followers, you must do it quickly and efficiently.
Here are the best practices to grow your followers on Snapchat:
- Promote your Snapchat across different social media platforms and use your Snapcode.
- Know the best time to post on Snapchat.
- Post trendy snaps.
- Don’t post long stories; be short and concise.
Conclusion
Growing your followers on social media can be time-consuming and challenging. Not only do you have to find the right approaches and strategies, but you’ll need different approaches and strategies to grow your followers across other platforms.
But certain tips work best across all social media platforms. What’s important is to be authentic and focus on quality content, as that gives you the best chance to grow your followers naturally.
Ideally, you want your social media profile to be a hub for quality content, as that’s the easiest way to drive engagement and traffic to your website or landing page.
If you’re looking to leverage social media for your business, we have other tips to help you pick the right social media platform for your brand.
Author Bio
Erik Bergman co-founded Catena Media and helped grow it to over 300 employees and a $200 million valuation before stepping away to start Great.com, an iGaming organization that donates 100% of its profits to environmental charities. In addition to running a successful online business, Erik also hosts the Becoming Great podcast, shares entrepreneurship tips with his more than 1 million social media followers, and contributes to sites like Entrepreneuer.com, Business Insider, Foundr, and Forbes.
