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