Growing a social media page organically is tougher than you think. Today, so many people are competing for the same audiences on every social media platform. To grow your brand, here are five crucial tips to take note of:
Do What You Love
List things that you’re passionate about and choose one that you could plausibly create content for. These things don’t have to just be hobbies; they can be people, places, causes, music, and more! Whatever you choose, make sure you are able to post five to seven days per week. Keep in mind that you don’t always have to create content for every single one of those days; you can curate content from the community as well.
Start by making a Venn-diagram of your values, your talents, and your experience. You know you've found your personal brand when you find the intersection between all three.
Be Genuine
This next point goes hand-in-hand with the first -- you can’t be genuine if you don’t love what you’re doing. When you stick to who you are and love what you do, people with similar passions will come to you. Trying to please everyone else only makes you look like a faceless brand and not a human. Remember: people want to interact with people, not brands.
Engage With the Community
On social media, competition is not competition. If you build relationships with your competitors, you can share followers and promote one-another.
Engaging with existing influences in your community or industry can help your brand grow as well. You can strike up brand deals with influencers, and collaborate through influencer marketing. Social media is a great way to communicate directly with people in your industry, build relationships, and share industry knowledge and best practices. You may gain new insights on your target audience by collaborating with others!
Another key advantage of engaging with your community is content curation. If you get involved with your community, you will stumble upon a lot of great user-generated content (UGC) that you can share and tag the creator in. By tagging the creator, you are making him or her aware of your page, and you can direct their followers to your page.
Tag Active Industry Participants
Tagging active industry participants is an extremely effective way to drive traffic to your own page. For example, by tagging an active participant on a LinkedIn post, the Rhode Island Business Competition was able to not only gain a whopping 536 impressions (up from an average of zero) [fig. 1], but was able to maintain a much higher amount of impressions per month (779 as of November) [fig. 2].
[Figure 1 - Impressions from the Oct 19, 2021 post featuring a past competitor who is active on Linkedin]
[Figure 2 - impressions overall by month]
When you tag active participants in your posts, they are likely to appreciate the shoutout, and will share your post to their network in return. From here, you can build a lasting relationship with these people where you will be able to collaborate with them in the future.
Keep Your Strategic Goals in Mind
Keeping your strategic goals in mind is much easier said than done. When you run a social media page, it can be easy to get lost in keeping up with your content schedule. When you create or curate content, be sure to stop and ask yourself if this piece of content helps you toward your goal. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to drive awareness, put yourself in the viewer’s shoes. Pretend that this post is the first post a customer sees from your page. Is it memorable? Is it shareable? Would you click on this page if you were unaware of the brand? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you need to go back to the drawing board. By keeping your goals in mind, you will be able to create content with purpose. Always keep in mind: quality exceeds quantity any day.