10 Tips For Getting More Followers

10 tips for getting more followers

OCT 11, 2017social media

Okay, so by now most marketers or social media users out there will know some of the general rules to getting more followers.

But, we’re here to take you from the basics of social media to dive deeper into some of the most popular channels. After all, that’s probably where most of your followers will be!

1. Keep Your Social Media Names Consistent
If you flick back to the beginning of this article, you will know that you need to be consistent. So first things first, you must make sure your social media names are similar if not the same (across all channels). With the millions of users on each social media channel, it can be hard to get the exact Twitter name or Facebook Page title you want. That’s fine. Though, being completely random with each of your social media names, “because it is the only one there”, isn’t going to easily lead followers to your channel.

We’ve all been there. Forgotten the name of something and when it comes to searching for it online, mimic a person searching for treasure on a huge island without a map. Pretty useless. Just like when your followers want to find your social channel but only know the name of your brand, it’s pretty hard to find you if your social name is something completely different to your business name.

Tip: Make sure your account usernames match your business name. Avoid abbreviations whenever possible.

Example:

Let’s say you are a construction company. Your brand name is ‘Creative Constructions’ and you offer home improvement and new build services. Unfortunately, the Twitter username ‘@CreativeConstructions’ isn’t available (and doesn’t fit the character limit), but ‘@CreateTweets’ is so that’s what you opt for. It’s okay, but it doesn’t quite tell followers who you are and is pretty misleading. Instead try different combinations such as:

@CCTweets
@CreateC0nstruct
@CreativeBuilds
@CreateConstruct
@CreateCon5truct

Good To Know: Your username cannot be longer than 15 characters and it must only contain alphanumeric characters (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9) with the exception of underscores.

2. Cross Promote Social Channels
It’s good to let your Twitter followers know you have other social channels that can offer them other bits of information such as deals, freebie competitions and news stories that might not fit your Twitter feed.

Building a following on one channel is great, but expanding that to all of your social channels can help to improve your overall social presence to become a dominant social influencer in your industry.

For some businesses, only a few platforms can work for their business. We understand that. So if you are super successful on Instagram and find that Twitter or LinkedIn isn’t really for you, don’t spend hours there. Still, it’s good to offer different sites and apps your customers can use to find out about your social shenanigans. What you think works for you, might not always work for your potential customers. Give them options!

3. Reshare Related Posts
Sharing related posts is a great way to diversify your feed and make it more appealing to scroll through. Try and mix it up a little. Sharing text posts, images and videos can help to make your channel more exciting, catering to all types of users by giving them different types of media to browse through.

As well as making it a more exciting experience for your followers, sharing other people’s content encourages them to interact with you and even return the favour. Although, to make this more guaranteed, try talking to influencers…

4. Talk To Influencers
Sometimes getting a good following isn’t a one-man job or one-brand job in a business case. Particularly if you are just starting out, or maybe you have hit a brick wall, it’s good to get a helping hand to promote your content. As you engage, it’s likely that they will engage back. Over time you can establish a more official relationship, where agreements are made to almost guarantee frequent promotions of your social content.

Researching into achievable collaborations that aren’t just related to your industry, but also your brand and the message you want to portray is the first significant step. Let’s think about it in terms of ‘Creative Constructions’. Collaborating with an influencer who talks everything home improvement, housing trends and new builds would be a perfect match for their social content.

Remember: Make sure you establish an agreement with the influencer on what you want them to help you with and how you are both okay with doing so. Sometimes using influencers to share your content or talk about your products can be a one-off situation. Collaborating should be an ongoing thing. If you can find a niche influencer to work with continuously, you will be well on your way to getting more followers!

5. Connect With Complementary Businesses

You shouldn’t just look for individual influencers. Although they might seem easier to reach, that isn’t always the case. Plus, not everything they post will be relatable. Connecting with a peripheral business will tend to be in keeping with your tone, particularly those looking for more formal, professional posts, which is perceived to come more from businesses rather than individuals.

Get sharing each other’s content regularly. That doesn’t mean every post. But if you find it useful to your users, it’s good to give it a retweet or regran to easily put targeted content in their feed, whilst giving your brain a break from creating new content. It’s a win-win!

Tip: Just like with an individual influencer, make sure you both have a clear outline of how frequently you will repost and when.

6. Guest Blog On Niche Sites
Okay, so we already know that getting your social content shared by influencers and complementary businesses is great, but what are the next steps? It’s rather simple. Having established a relationship with a business or individual, up the ante and spread from social to their site by guest blogging.

7. Let’s Get Channel Specific!
You now know some generic tips to getting a better following and the social media side too! Now it’s important to channel your focus onto the specific social media sites that if not all, most of your customers are actively using. Ready?

8. Turning Tweets from Terrible to Twitterific
Improving your tweets can be done in multiple ways. But to specifically increase your following, it’s best to practice the following:

Use Relevant Hashtags

It’s not unusual to come across lots of Twitter posts that contain hashtags. In fact, the once boring, plain and useless hashtag has been enhanced by Twitter to become an online sensation. Now, it isn’t just home to Twitter but has spread its wings and flown to multiple social channels to bring many benefits.

Hashtags on Twitter are designed to help you find content that is trending. Twitter brings up trending hashtags on your news feed page. Businesses can use these, if relevant, to tweet with the popular hashtags to get increased exposure and engagement.>

Trending hashtags can be shown for your specific area or worldwide. For those local businesses who want to spark social engagement with users nearby, utilising the trending hashtags can be extremely beneficial.

Hashtags can also be created by a business for a particular event or to encourage people talking about you, to make them easily found. For example, for Macmillan’s Coffee Morning on Friday 29th September 2017, they created a specific hashtag that all participants in the event can use to showcase that they are involved. The hashtag was ‘#macmillancoffeemorning2017’.

By searching for this hashtag, all relevant posts, photos, people and so on are streamlined into one feed. This gives the user each and every post that includes ‘#macmillancoffeemorning2017’ in a simple and easy way to scroll through.

Hold Giveaways to Reward Fans

Rewarding fans whilst also bring fun and excitement to their day is executed through the use of a giveaway or competition. Get them to engage with you and in return give them a freebie or discount code.

For example, Slimfast uses a giveaway to get engagement and then reward a random user who got involved. In order to win they cleverly ensure that their post doesn’t just get retweeted (shared) by their followers, but that a user also replies to the post with a comment on why they should win.

Good To Know: Slimfast also incorporated a specific brand hashtag ‘#SlimFastChallenge’ and the hashtag ‘#win’. The ‘#win’ hashtag is often included to posts that offer the user a chance to get their hands on a freebie. Try to use it yourself!

Use Lists to Find the Latest Industry Trends

Setting up a Twitter list can help you follow the leading industry sources which gives you access to sharing breaking news to your followers. It’s a simple way of getting the most up-to-date, current affairs in the market, without having to spend hours of research trying to spy out the trends.

9. Finding Followers through Facebook
Just like many social channels, there are lots of different ways a business can get more followers on Facebook. Some of the most useful ways that are often overlooked but bring great results are:
- Answering questions left on abandoned Facebook pages
- Using promoted Facebook posts

Answer Questions on Abandoned Pages

When someone asks a question, it more than often is because some are stuck and need an answer – though that’s not the case if it’s rhetorical. But, many Facebook pages that get a lot of engagement can be hard to manage. Questions get missed and with time becoming more and more precious for people, not every user gets allocated with an answer.

That’s where you come in. Start by researching into pages that are relevant to your business. Keep an eye on how often the replies are responded to and look out for those that are missed. If you are following the right pages, answering user questions should be pretty simple. After all, you’re the expert!

You’d be surprised at how many big brands have massive numbers of Facebook fans, and yet virtually ignore the questions and comments these fans leave. Respond in a helpful, non-promotional way to unanswered questions (and be sure to answer as your Page).” – Inc.

Use Promoted Posts

Many social channels have the option to promote your posts. This is a great way to pay a small fee to extend your reach and get seen by more people. Facebook makes use of this with post ‘boosts’. Though boosting any post is beneficial for increasing exposure, monitoring which posts are the most engaging and creating similar posts will bring more benefits to the business.

10. Improving Your Instagram
Just like many other aspects of your business, working to the idea ‘only the best will do’, can help you function at a high standard to deliver an excellent customer experience with your brand. Socially, you should implement the same attitude.

Use High-Quality Images
On Instagram, the image is what makes or breaks your feed. It’s true, ‘only the best photos will do.’ This interlinks with a general rule that you should focus on quality over quantity. Posting a ton of poor quality images isn’t going to get you very far. Keep your options open. If you have a few great images to choose from, you can share the cream of the crop each time you’re due to post.

Tip: If you can’t take your own high quality images, employee someone to do so, or use photos sites to purchase photos that make a statement. Don’t think you can get away with poor quality, cheap-looking photos if you are looking to build a strong following.

Actively Seek People to Follow

Don’t expect to get lots of followers if you aren’t willing to follow some people back. Although building a following doesn’t work on an i-follow-you you-follow-me basis, to get in with the right people, it’s important to do some following yourself.

Following others will help to give you some inspiration for your future posts. It shouldn’t be practised all the time, though it is important to note what works for other people, might work for you too.

Get Engaging!

Having found the people to follow, interacting with their content can help get your name out to their users. Like and comment on popular posts that are related to your business. By posting a message on their photo and using relevant hashtags and emoticons in the post, you can get noticed and encourage users to click on your profile too!

Final Thoughts

Awesome! By now, you will know what to do so go and put it into practice. Having the knowledge to get more followers is great, but if you don’t decide to implement it into your social marketing strategy, your following will remain pretty similar – maybe with even less.

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