Surely you have wondered many times how you can improve the presence of your business on social networks. Quality of followers vs quantity? What social networks are the most suitable for your business? What should you publish and how?
In this post, we will try to answer these questions and we will give some tips to boost your social accounts and get a community of followers that helps to achieve the expected objectives.
Quality vs quantity?
Before entering the matter, it is necessary to clarify the debate on whether it is better to obtain a large number of followers, but of low quality, or a few followers but of high quality. At first glance, it seems that a Facebook account or page with 6,000 followers is more important and gives more credibility than one that has 1,000, but you always have to ask yourself the following question: Are those followers really working towards meeting the objectives?
In this example, it would be useless to have 6,000 followers on Facebook if later most of them neither comment, nor share, nor interact or are directly inactive. The only thing we would have is a large number that would not contribute anything to our social media strategy, and surely we are directing our efforts to people who have little or no interest in what we offer, causing us to waste resources and time on something where we are hardly going to get results.
It goes without saying that the purchase of false followers or those of doubtful origin is not recommended and that in the end, it can be very harmful, due to the aforementioned and because it can cause the closure of the Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account, in the cases more extreme.
On the other hand, if we only have 1,000 followers, but the community is very active and interested in what we do or publish, we will be laying the foundations to achieve a community that supports what we do and will help us achieve more presence among our target audience, establish our brand and, why not, get more sales.
This is where we must work and focus our efforts, to increase that community and thus be able to meet the established objectives.
The important thing is to get a large community of followers and also that it is of quality. It is difficult to achieve, we are not going to fool ourselves, but if it is not possible or it costs too much to increase our followers, always ensure that at least those followers are of quality.
The important thing is to get a large community of followers and also that it is of quality.
What strategies to apply to get followers on social networks?
Once the above is clarified, we are going to see a series of general guidelines to follow when developing a strategy to get quality followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network:
Study the competition
As has always been done in marketing, the first thing we have to do is analyze the competition, since they will be targeting an audience very similar to ours (if not the same).
The study which profiles are the most interesting by their level of affinity, frequency of publication, number of followers and level of engagement (percentage between the number of publications and the interactions of the community with those publications).
Then start following the best quality ones, as it will help you detect new ways to reach your audience or take advantage of opportunities that your competition is not offering, and little by little you will build a community of qualified profiles related to your brand or product.
Analyzing the competition will help you detect new ways to reach your audience and take advantage of opportunities.
Choose the social networks you should be on
It is important to know where we are going to establish our presence in social networks since it will mark the line to follow in our content strategy. It is useless to be in all existing networks if we do not know who to contact and how to do it.
To do this, we must ask ourselves the following questions: What is my customer like? Where can I find him? How will my customer interact with my product or service? In short, it’s about building our buyer persona, as we mentioned in this article on Inbound Marketing.
Once you are clear about this, you will know if you have to establish your presence in one network or another. For example, if your product is very visual and is aimed at a young audience, establishing your presence on Instagram can be very successful, while a renovation services company will be better off creating a Facebook page to show their work and attend to Your clients.
Publish quality content and interest on social networks
Once we have defined our target audience and in which social networks we are going to establish ourselves, we must develop our content strategy. Value content is essential to gain followers on social networks and generate engagement.
Valuable content is essential to gain followers on social networks.
To develop our content plan, we can rely on the following guidelines:
- What are we going to publish?
- Where are we going to post?
- How often will we post?
Once the above is established, we have to ensure that the content is interesting for our audience. Talk about what you really are an expert or passionate about, try to create interesting debates, provide solutions to problems that your clients may have, carry out well-argued analyzes, surveys, contests, etc., and of course, do not stop analyzing your target audience to find out what interests them most and when you should provide it.
Establish collaboration agreements with influencers or partners
Another issue that must be taken into account is knowing how to identify those collaborators or partners who can help us carry out actions to increase followers on our social networks.
Look for influencers, organizations, institutions, etc., that are related to our brand image, content line and that connect with our community. Follow them, share their posts or content, comment to add value, and later, try to propose collaboration agreements with them.
Getting punctual agreements will help a lot to increase our followers and gain visibility and influence.
Monitor your followers on social networks
Analyzing and monitoring your networks on a daily basis will provide you with valuable information about which followers are inactive, which ones publish content that does not correspond to our content strategy, which users we follow but are not really interested in following, or which topics or hashtags are generating conversation on every moment.
If we do this work, we can further refine our community of followers and thus provide greater segmentation and precision when making and publishing our content, increasing our level of engagement.
Tools such as Hootsuite, TweetReach, or Social Mention are some examples of free software that can help us in this task.
Adapt the content format for social networks
Following the line of publishing quality content, it is not enough just that the content is interesting, it must also be adapted to the social network and the audience we are addressing.
The size of the images, texts, videos, and others must be suitably adapted and optimized. Above all, the mobile format must be taken into account, given the exponential use that these devices have experienced in recent years. Putting large images or texts that are too long will cause a negative reaction in users and they could stop following us since you will be hindering their navigation.
The video format is widely used in social networks. If the videos are to be self-made, it is a good idea to plan them so that they can be interpreted without sound (as long as the type of product or service allows it), since a significant number of users watch the videos in
Support your social media strategy with Social Ads
We are not going to fool ourselves, many times, especially when our brand is new, it is necessary to support our strategy with some advertising on social networks to start giving visibility and presence to our product or brand.
Most social networks have tools and sections to carry out this work, and they have more and more weight if we want to establish our presence in those networks, to the detriment of organic positioning or reach (number of people who are impacted with our content in a natural way and without carrying out advertising campaigns).
Despite this, we still need to make quality content on a regular basis, since advertising will help us to gain followers quickly, but the other will get those users to “hook” on our content and end up following us.
Moving from advertising on social networks, we continue to need to produce quality content on a regular basis.
Tools such as Facebook Ads, Facebook insights or Twitter Ads will help us to create our advertising campaigns in an easy and intuitive way, allowing us to segment our campaigns by demographic, geographical, tastes, preferences, etc.
Set your goals
Last but not least, when carrying out our social media strategy, we must establish what objectives we intend to achieve and how we are going to achieve it, for example, increasing our number of fans, attracting web traffic, gaining more visibility or working on pro of sales, and what actions are we going to carry out to achieve it (content plan, Social Ads, campaigns with influencers, etc). Of course, these objectives must be realistic and consistent with the capabilities and resources of the business.
It is of little use to set impossible goals that we will never reach since it will generate frustration and a waste of resources and time that we could invest in other more profitable tasks.
Always have social networks monitored and watch their activity since they will help you to know if the established objective is being met or on the contrary, it is not being reached and we must adopt corrective measures or make greater efforts to correct the course.
When we set our goals, they must be realistic and consistent with the capabilities and resources of the business.