Whether you have an existing business or are starting a new venture out-right, you’re going to reach a point where you need to establish a strong social media presence that boosts your visibility and highlights the brands your target audience is interested in engaging. The truth is, there is no easy shortcut for having a thriving social media following overnight. You need to develop a strategy, actively engage multiple avenues to attract new followers, then do everything physically possible to keep them engaged afterwards. Starting from the top, let’s run through a few ways you can eagerly build a strong social media presence.
Before you even start worrying about how people are going to see your page you need to figure out what’s going to be on it. With what you personally know about the audience you’re trying to attract. Ask yourself, what am I going to post and how often am I going to post it? From high quality memes to eye-catching multimedia that either informs or entertains your audience. There’s no single thing that everyone wants to watch online. Identify what your niche should be.
After that, I would recommend curating a large library of digital media content that you can schedule out to post automatically over an adjustable range of time. As a general rule of thumb, try to have a post ready to go live twice a day, every day. If this comes across as a lofty aspiration, sharing other posts can work well as filler content, but never as your main piece of meat. This content curating phase is important for actually retaining the audience once you begin your organic and paid outreach strategies. The last thing you want is for people to finally start visiting your page or channel, only for it to look like a ghost town. Content is king, and the first thing you should focus on.
Now that you have a gigantic list of scheduled posts let’s talk about those outreach strategies, starting by cultivating organic reach. Every platform has unique features you can leverage to get eyeballs on your content. Facebook for example, has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of groups segmented by common interest. If you’re a motorsports page. Join as many motorsports groups as possible and engage those communities both with personable questions and comments, but also by sharing the content you’re posting on your page. If you’re on LinkedIn or Instagram. Never stop networking. Find your industry and connect with everyone in sight. Trust me, they want followers too!
Some are harder, like YouTube, due to the mass amounts of white noise to overcome, I kid you not, according to Google, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The key to overcoming this is to find external sites to engage people on and bring them back to your YouTube video. Reddit and those common interest Facebook groups are perfect for this. Just make sure you aren’t breaking any self-promotion rules in these external communities.
Now that we have organic reach taken care of, it’s up to you to decide if it’s even worth it to pursue a paid content strategy. Perform a risk analysis exercise. Here are some of the things you should consider. How big is my budget? What am I trying to obtain (leads, page likes, as much reach as possible, etc.)? How well is my organic content performing on its own? Am I beginning to plateau? Do I need to dedicate time to creating media solely to be used paid content? If so, how much time? How good do my results have to be to justify my campaign budget?
Once you begin to ask yourselves these questions it should become clear to you what you’re willing or not willing to pursue. Maybe you’ve come to the determination that the organic strategies we already discussed are performing well enough that you don’t need to put money into your page yet. On the other hand, you could decide that it’s time to invest a bit of money into a pilot run, to see how far X amount of money can get you before committing to a long-term strategy.
Whatever you decide, determine a future date for you to come back and perform this risk analysis again based on the findings from your last assessment.
Now that you’ve taken time to think out your plan on attack, it’s time to execute it. Don’t give up and stay persistent. To be completely honest, it might be a fortnight before you get your first comment. Just wait, and when you get that comment. Engage them as quickly as possible. Coming across as personable and attentive when the moment calls for it goes a long way.
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