Expanding your social media presence can be tricky. The competition is fierce, and your audience can be fickle. It takes planning and hard work.
In this blog, we cover off how you can attract more followers to your social media accounts, why followers matter, how not fall into the vanity metrics trap, and the best ways to get more followers on social media.
How important is my follower count?
Is your follower count important? Yes. And no.
What really matters, whether you’re an influencer or a small business owner, is return on investment (ROI). Having one actively engaged follower who reposts, shares and interacts with your content is more valuable than having one hundred unengaged, uninterested followers.
That said, the more followers you have, the more influence you wield. Brands might approach you to market their product, whether as an Influencer or as an Affiliate Marketer. A larger following helps to build trust, which means people take notice when you post something. And the more your online presence will continue to grow.
So, while a large follower count might be classed as a vanity metric, and while it’s hard to see how it directly affects your ROI, there is definitely still value in growing your audience.
How can I attract more followers?
So, the big question is: how can you attract more followers on social media?
First things first— you need a social media strategy. Once you have a strategy in place, you can begin to work on growing your audience.
Learn what a good social media marketing strategy looks like and how you can apply it to your own goals. Read the blog and brush up on your social media knowledge: What is a good social media marketing strategy?
Here are some tips on how you can successfully increase your social media follower count.
1. Post valuable content
Once you’ve identified your target audience and your niche, you can start posting content that they will find valuable. Remember, your audience don’t want to be bombarded with ads. They’re going to want to follow your social media accounts because you can offer them something of value. Whether that’s in the form of insights, facts, humour, entertainment or anything else. You can still sell to them, of course, but you need to do it subtly.
2. Be authentic
We’ve stressed the importance of authenticity in other blogs before. Authenticity is important because, once you’ve built up a strong following, they’ll shy away from anything that feels inorganic or false. For example, if you’re striving to become a successful affiliate marketer and begin advertising a product that doesn’t gel with the image you’ve built, people simply won’t buy it. In today’s society where people feel that many aspects of social media are disingenuous, being uniquely you can count for a lot.
3. Build relationships
Part of growing your audience involves actively engaging with them. Don’t just like posts – comment on them. Retweet. Share. Join groups. Start your own trending hashtag. Encourage your followers to leave comments, and when they do, respond to them. It can take a lot of time making the effort to engage with your followers, but it will help to build trust and respect and help grow your audience.
4. Use a consistent tone of voice
While it’s ok to change your tone of voice for different channels (as it’s likely your Instagram audience will require a slightly different tone to your Facebook audience), you need to be consistent in those channels. Changing your tone of voice (like going from something jargon-heavy to something more casual for absolutely no reason) will throw people off.
5. Post on time
This is another really important point that can’t be underestimated. If you fall off the radar for a few weeks because you feel like you don’t have time to post, you’ll quickly be forgotten. There are plenty of tools (free and paid) out there that can help you automate your schedule, so make sure you do a bit of shopping around.
What’s the quickest way to grow my audience?
While there’s a few Tik Tok Influencers out there who seem to have been catapulted into stardom overnight, for most of us, this is unlikely to happen.
Growing your audience takes dedication, commitment and time.
Which leads us to our next query…
Should I buy likes and followers?
Buying followers is tempting. After all, what could be better than increasing your audience tenfold overnight?
However, we’re going to return to our above point: having just one, real engaged follower is much more valuable than having one hundred fake, unengaged followers.
What’s more, fake profiles and bots can be easily seen through by most tech-savvy people. If your audience discovers that you’re buying followers just to fluff up your follower count, they might lose trust in you and your brand.
You also won’t earn money from fake followers. So the ROI is going to be very, very low. Bots won’t be buying your products or reposting your content.
And with more sophisticated tools on the market being designed to spot fake profiles, big brands aren’t automatically going to ask you to promote their products just because you have a large audience. They’ll be doing their research to make sure you’re the real deal, and so are your followers. They’re not going to risk their reputation by aligning themselves with someone who buys likes and followers.
Some platforms, like Instagram, also frequently ‘purge’ their channel of fake accounts. So if you do end up buying followers, you could see them all purged the next day.
If you have the money to spend on fake followers, you’re much better off investing it elsewhere – like paid ads.
Ready to up your social media game?
If you’re ready to take your social media game to the next level, then take a look at OC’s partnership courses with Social Media College. These short online course will give you in-depth insights into different social media platforms, strategy, and how to get the most out of your social media marketing plan.
Find out more about our exciting social media online courses by clicking on the above links.
