Increasing your social media followers is one of the best ways to be recognized on social media and maintain a strong social media presence. This can be very beneficial, especially to businesses that want to save some of their advertising budget, and use this means to create awareness for their products and services.
Jumia Travel shares 5 ways that can help you increase your social media followers.
FREQUENTLY POST GOOD CONTENT THAT RELATES TO YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
This goes without saying. Good content pulls in followers like a magnet. Develop and frequently post good, useful, interesting and engaging content which relates to your target audience and that your target audience can relate with. Good, useful and interesting content will trend or go viral more often than not, draw interest on social media and help to increase your fans and followers.
BE INTERACTIVE
It’s not enough to just post good engaging content, you also have to interact with your followers and people that might just be ‘passing by’. Relate with them. Answer their questions. Make them feel important and heard. A good example of a Twitter handle that has recently had some success with this is the EFCC twitter handle. The person(s) managing the organization’s handle not only became more interactive with followers, but also added a hint of humor (an ‘entertainment value’) to these interactions. The result was increased recognition and a better social media presence.
Your approach does not have to emulate that of EFCC, especially if you consider your business or brand more conservative, but the idea of being interactive on your social media account is dynamic enough to be applied in any way that suits your business brand.
FIND AND FOLLOW OTHERS (AND OFTEN FOLLOW BACK WHEN FOLLOWED)
You don’t have to wait for followers to come to you, go out and find some to follow. But, even this approach needs tact to be effective, if not you will end up following tons of people who won’t follow back. Therefore, a suggestion you can use is to follow and give those you follow time to follow you back. Some will and for those that don’t, you can un-follow and continue your search for more followers. Don’t forget to send a message of appreciation to those who follow you back and use that means to, in a nutshell, introduce them to your social media platform.
Same goes for you too. If you expect others to follow you back, a number of those who follow you expect you to follow back or will like for you to follow back. This doesn’t mean you have to follow every single person that follows you, but you can instead look through the profiles of those who follow you, see those you are interested in and follow. This way, you appear more often on the suggestions section of the social media pages and increase your visibility. Not to mention the fact that you can also get inspiration for content from the diversity of your social media followers, and also share some of their posts to help with content.
OFFER DEALS, GIVEAWAYS OR PROMOS
There are very few people who will not jump at the offer of a nice and exclusive deal, or who will not like to participate for a chance to win a promo or giveaway. Doing this from time to time will get your target audience’s attention and, as a result, can help you get more followers.
DON’T FORGET INFLUENCERS
Reach out to influencers on social media, that is people with a large social media following. Mention them in some of your posts that are related to them, attempt to build a relationship with them. This increases your chances of having your posts shared by these influencers to their followers, and also increases your chances of getting a few recommendations about your business or brand from them to their followers in some of their individual posts from time to time.