Social media is one of the top ways to reach consumers, offering the biggest reach for each dollar spent.
While paid social media ads remain a great way to engage today’s consumers, however, ads can easily be ignored, especially if they’re surrounded by interesting updates from friends and colleagues.
For several years, businesses have turned to social media influencers to broaden their reach. Whether they’re active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or another platform, these influencers have numerous active followers who consistently follow and share the information they post.
But you don’t have to partner with an influencer to reach a wider audience. Here are a few tips to help you increase your own social media influence.
Post Interesting Content
Before you can attract fully-engaged followers, you must first give them something interesting to follow. Work hard to generate interesting content like blog posts and videos and share them freely across your platforms. Also, consistently posting content helps you in attracting more followers to your platform.
Make sure it’s content that your target demographic would be interested in, including how-to tips and advice. Sharing promotional information about your brand won’t be effective unless you find a way to clearly demonstrate how your product or service is changing lives or adding value to businesses.
Don’t limit your content to what you can create yourself. Instead sign up for services that make it easier to find information relevant to your followers so that you can share it. By incorporating content curation into your strategy, you’ll be able to regularly share interesting content with little effort. You’ll also be able to build relationships with those whose content you share, especially if the piece was written by or about someone in your industry.
Create infographics and post them to your social media accounts. Original visual content spreads!
Mind Your Branding
Creating a consistent brand recognizably is key to building up social media engagements and community. Make sure your branding is reflected throughout all your channels, including your social media profiles, your blog and your landing pages. Every person clicking your social media link needs to instantly feel at home.
Make sure your cover images, your profile pictures and your images include your logo and your official recognizable colors. If you are at an early stage of launching your digital presence, make sure to use Namify to find a catchy brand name and your future logo (both are free!)
Optimize Your Customer Support
Train your customer support representatives to reply to social media messages (especially on Facebook Messenger which becomes a default social media contact method). Diversify the methods your customers can use to reach out to you. Set up a phone app to let people instantly get help (using AI phone assistants).
Make sure your team is trained to handle a social media crisis when a negative feedback goes (or is about to go) viral. Invest time and research into creating a customer service plan that will guide your reps through any questionable situations and help them avoid reputation crises.
Monitor Results
As early in the process as possible, set up services to help you track your efforts. In doing so, you’ll be able to determine the type of content that engages followers and boosts your reach. A tool like Cyfe lets you monitor your social presence using simple widgets.
You can also easily see which of your posts got the most traction across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube. Perhaps the most valuable tool is the built-in ability to monitor social media performance, which helps determine your level of influence on social platforms.
On social media, interaction is key to success as an influencer. Make sure you have a solid social listening plan to keep an eye on your customers’ questions, competitors and industry trends.
Tools like Awario let you set up notifications for any mention of your brand, your industry, the products you sell, your competitors, and more. If you’re notified right away of relevant online posts, you can reply or share the information more quickly than your competitors might, giving you an edge in your market.
You can also use Awario or such tools as Heepsy alternatives to identify influencers and interact with them, possibly leading to them eventually sharing your content and giving you valuable exposure.
Partner Up
You can extend your reach by finding a way to work others into the pieces you post. When you tag someone, that person is likely to share the post, which will then put your name in front of all of that person’s followers.
Make an arrangement with others in your industry to contribute to your official blog, swapping posts on different days to get more exposure. You’ll both have interesting content from a new voice and you’ll also be able to share the post across your platforms, with your host sharing the information, as well. Make sure to set up a newsletter to alert your subscribers of those articles and get them share your new content.
Services like Help a Reporter can help you gain exposure you wouldn’t have otherwise had. Journalists post requests for interviews and quotes and qualified experts pitch their own experience. If chosen, you could be featured in a prominent publication.
This leads to a great opportunity to build your influence, since you’ll be able to share the link on social media, tagging the publication. The author, publication, and others mentioned in the piece may post about it, as well.
When your social media influence rises, you can launch a post and reach a larger group of people. You may also find other brands want to partner with you to help expand their reach. With so many tools available to help, you can monitor your results and tweak your content marketing campaigns to reach more people and land more long-term customers.
