Organically growing your audience is extremely important for developing a successful social media marketing platform. Follower counts are a quantitative recording of how you resonate with your target audience. The goal is to convert your desired audience members into followers and retain them through consistent and relevant content.
Organically growing your audience can be achieved in the below steps.
Step 1: Get to know your audience and follow them
Not all followers are the same. Suppose you go around following every user you can. In that case, you will have low retention and engagement rates because this audience isn’t genuinely interested in your business or content. Understanding your target audience is essential before implementing best practices or campaigns in your social media strategy.
Existing data sources like Pew Research Center, Facebook Audience Insights, and Smart Insights can provide insights into your audience’s channels, interests, and behavior. Brands can also use advanced social listening tools, research, partner with industry leaders, and utilize hashtags to learn more about their audience. Using these methods, you can define your audience and create a profile of their demographics and interests.
Now that you’ve developed the profile for your target audience: follow them! A great way to find user profiles that match your audience profiles is to go to your competitors’ pages, click on their following, search for keywords relevant to your brand, and a list of potential customers will appear. Now you can start following the users that fit your profile.
Once you have that base of potential customers, convert users with high following counts. A repost or other engagement from a highly followed user can increase credibility and following for your brand. Just like that, you’ve started building a community and growing organically.
Step 2: Build a Community
Building a community is arguably the most critical step in organically growing your following because it is often the largest factor in retention. Users will continue following and engaging with accounts that provide them with information relevant to their interests, but they also want to be a part of a community that values them. You can show your users value by implementing increased interaction between them and your brand.
Start by engaging with your audience. Engaging with your audience on social media can help build brand loyalty and increase engagement. Brands should respond to comments and messages in a timely and personalized manner, thank customers for their support and feedback, and ask for their opinions and suggestions.
This first-hand communication helps to build a more meaningful relationship between you and the consumer. Brands can also join social media groups and discussions to engage with their audience and build relationships with other industry leaders.
Another way of engaging with your audience is to leverage user-generated content (UGC). UGC can be a powerful tool for brands to engage with their audience and increase their reach. Brands can encourage UGC by asking for customer feedback and reviews, hosting social media contests, and creating campaigns encouraging users to share their content using branded hashtags. Make sure to always ask for permission and credit users when sharing UGC. This keeps your audience engaged and excited about your content, leading to a positive brand experience.
Step 3: Curate Relevant Content
Creating shareable content that resonates with your audience is key to growing your audience organically. One of the keys to social media marketing is to provide the target audience with content that adds value to their lives. Brands should focus on creating content that educates, entertains, inspires, or solves problems for their audience.
Additionally, users are more likely to share visual content. For example, infographics are visual pieces of educational content that can fit all of the relevant information on one screen. These have high shareability because they can easily be reposted as Instagram or Facebook stories.
Optimizing relevant content with hashtags can help brands increase their reach, visibility, and engagement on social media. Brands should research and use hashtags their audience uses rather than just popular ones. Brands can also create branded hashtags to build brand awareness and encourage user-generated content. These little changes make a difference in organically reaching your target audience.
Growing your following organically is no simple task. Organic growth hinges on a brand’s ability to understand and engage with its audience while providing relevant content. This content must be impactful for customers to take notice of it on social media, interact with it, and share it so their followers will consider joining your brand’s community. Organic growth doesn’t happen overnight but invest in your community, and you will see members of your target audience slowly start to convert and share your content.