Blog

Why Fan Growth on Social Media is Important and How to Measure It

Why Fan Growth on Social Media is Important and How to Measure It

Similar to how athletes and performers thrive in the company of fans, your social media presence needs that same energy to succeed. 

As with most things, it’s important to prioritize the quality of your Fans over quantity. But, it’s okay to want quantity, too. A loyal social media audience will engage with your content to propel its Reach, boost awareness, and eventually, convert to customers. Imagine how a large quantity of high-quality Fans could impact your business.

So, how does one go about growing a social media fanbase? ThumbStopper can help answer that.

What Are Good Fan Growth Rates?

First, you need to set a goal to work toward, which in this case should be growing your fanbase by a certain percentage each month. 

  • Instagram’s average Fan Growth Rates range between 1.5 to 2.5 percent per month.
  • Facebook average ranges from .64 to 2.2 percent each month.
  • Twitter’s range constantly fluctuates, but currently, some of the fastest growing accounts are averaging Fan Growth Rates of four percent per month.

When it comes to measuring Fan Growth, it’s important to remember that the percentage rate at which your Fans increase per month matters more than the actual number of new Fans. 

How To Grow A Social Fanbase

Why Fan Growth on Social Media is Important and How to Measure It

Consistency is a must for building your audience. Social algorithms highly prioritize it when determining what content to show Fans. This means you should be posting on each of your channels at least three times per week to get algorithms working in your favor. Consistent posting supports consistent Engagement, which is another must-have for facilitating Fan Growth.

How To Generate More Engagement

Why Fan Growth on Social Media is Important and How to Measure It

With that being said, consistent posting doesn’t guarantee Engagement. It sure helps by increasing your content’s visibility, but that content needs to do its part to win Fans over. Here are a few tips you can use to create engaging content.

Organic Content

Use All Available Features

Go beyond grid and timeline posts. Depending on the platform, there are several other features you can employ to engage Fans and attract new ones. 

Instagram offers a slew of interactive features, including Reels, live broadcasting (which can then be saved to your profile as IGTV posts), and Stories. Within Stories, you can create polls or ask multiple-choice and open-ended questions for Fans to contribute to. People tend to enjoy sharing feedback or joining in on conversations when it’s as easy as Instagram makes it.

Facebook also offers live-broadcasting and story features. Even Twitter jumped on the bandwagon with its take on Stories, called Fleets.

Incentivize Engagement

For Fans needing an extra push to engage with your social media content, here are a few ideas:

  • Host a contest or giveaway that requires a user to follow your account, like the post, and add a comment tagging other users for entry, as this provides a natural exposure boost.
  • Create valuable content that Fans want to repost and share on their own profiles or save to refer back to later.
  • Feature user-generated content, as this will encourage followers to tag your account in their posts, exposing your business’s page to their followers.

Engage Back

Showing current and potential Fans that you’re responsive can encourage regular interactions from them. This doesn’t mean you need to be constantly online monitoring your channels, but responding to comments on your content or leaving nice messages on posts you’ve been tagged in helps develop loyalty and eventually, boosts growth.

Paid Content

If you have flexibility within your marketing budget to allot some dollars toward paid social posts, try it out. Paid content puts your business in front of people you likely wouldn’t have reached organically and can ultimately increase Fans. Because the goal of this paid initiative isn’t generating sales but driving awareness and traffic to your page, put your money toward boosting and promoting your existing high-performing content. If it did well organically, it will likely be just as appealing to the new users you’ll reach using paid tactics.

How To Measure the Success of Your Efforts

In order to know whether your Engagement and Fan Growth efforts are truly succeeding, you need to look at the data. Specifically, these three metrics.

Reach

By measuring the Reach of a post, you’re able to see the number of individuals who saw it. They won’t always be Fans — especially if you’re using reach-expanding tactics like hashtags, geotags, and paid boosting — but if the number of individuals your posts reach is consistently disproportionate to your Follower Growth Rate, your content might be the problem. It’s possible that it’s not as engaging as it could be.

Engagement Rate

Speaking of, that’s something you can track as well. This metric measures the number of Engagement actions — Likes, Comments, Shares, Retweets — a post receives in relation to your number of Fans. You can use this to gauge how well a specific post resonated with Fans (or didn’t), which can guide the future types of content you post.

Fan Growth Rate

We touched on this metric earlier when discussing good Fan Growth Rates for each social media platform, but to reiterate: it measures the percentage at which your Fans change and grow over a period of time. It’s more important to track than the number of new Fans alone, as it reflects growth proportional to your existing audience size.

An account with 5,000 Fans that adds 250 more within a month can boast a really solid Fan Growth Rate of five percent. For an account with a million followers, gaining 250 more over a month equates to a measly growth of .03 percent. A five percent growth rate here would look like 50,000 new Fans. If your Fans aren’t growing at an incremental rate, you can deduce that your social media strategy needs to be adjusted to include more valuable, engaging content.

Grow Even Faster With Social Media Automation

Well-timed, consistent social media activity is essential for increasing Fan Growth and Engagement, but it also requires time and resources businesses can’t spare. With a social media automation tool like ThumbStopper doing the work for you, you can focus on effectively running your business.

Why Fan Growth on Social Media is Important and How to Measure It

The average business page gains Fans at a rate of 1.6 percent. Businesses using ThumbStopper to manage their social media presence grow Fans at a rate of 12.5 percent. We handle posting content consistently and at the right time to help grow your social fanbase, and grow it quickly. Boost your Fan Growth with ThumbStopper today.

Featured Resources
BLOG
How to Reach a Local Audience With Automated Content Distribution
Lifehacks that Every Big Brand CMO Needs to See
CASE STUDY
The Story Behind A National Powersports Brand’s New Recreational Vehicle Launch
How STIHL Canada Drove a Successful Co-Op Marketing Campaign Utilizing Marketing Technology
GUIDE
How to Get Retailers to Participate in Your Channel Marketing Program
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_row]
[/et_pb_column]

Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
How Effective Is Your Social Media Strategy
[/et_pb_section][/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_row]
[/et_pb_column]

Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It’s one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience – with your accessible, branded content – in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
How Effective Is Your Social Media Strategy
[/et_pb_section]