Advice for Growing Your Social Presence

Whether you’re well versed in the world of social media marketing or just starting out, growing the social presence for your business is no easy thing to do.

The pressure to have top notch social media content these days is vital to the success of a company. If you’re struggling with your social media presence, or you’re unsure where to even start, here’s some advice for how you can get it going.

Post regularly

One of the most vital things to do when managing social media accounts is making sure that you post regularly.

There’s nothing your viewers will hate more than seeing no content from you for a month, then seeing 5 posts from your page all in one day. It makes your brand appear disjoint and organized, as if you’re trying to catch up for lost time by posting a lot of content at a time.

If anything, you should post approximately once a day. This will ensure that you are present in your target audience’s mind, but aren’t annoying them while doing it.

If you don’t post regularly, it’s likely that you’ll lose current followers, and it decreases the chances that you’ll gain more.

An easy way to manage this is to plan content in advance, and set up a calendar schedule for what should be posted and when. This will prevent any missed posts or bombarding your followers.

Don’t post spam – post relevant content

As mentioned before, you should avoid spamming the timeline all at once with an annoying amount of content. You should also post only relevant content when you do post.

Posting just for the sake of posting won’t do you any good. There should be a purpose behind every post you make on social media, or it begins to feel like spam.

Imagine if an athletic wear company posted photos of candles and body care. Even if it is a high quality, appealing photo, this will confuse followers about your brand. They’ll wonder, what is this for? Am I missing something? Are they selling candles and body care now?

This is an easily avoidable problem if you make sure all of your content is relevant. If you want to advertise a pair of shoes that your business sells because they’re on sale, do that! This is exactly the kind of relevant (and non-spam) posts that should be in your social media feed.

It’s informative, fits your brand image, and simply makes sense. When choosing what to post and what not to post, those are the things you should consider.

Post engaging content

Sometimes it can feel like you’re posting all the right content, but it just isn’t getting the interaction and attention from your audience that you expected.

This can often happen when you aren’t posting engaging content for viewers.

One way to make sure your content is engaging is to make it spark a conversation. Why not ask a question in your caption? Ask your followers what they’re up to today, or where they like to wear their (your company)’s apparel?

This encourages comments and shares on your post. If you’re lucky, you may even get tagged in post by other users wearing your clothes!

Even doing a giveaway will ensure that your post gets more views and interactions than usual. An example of this is giving away a gift card, and to enter, viewers need to like the post, share it, tag friends, and follow your business’s account.

While you don’t need to make all of these things mandatory, even requiring people to share the post and like it will show your content to other potential consumers, and likely draw interest.

Keep track of your audience’s responses to content

If you want to grow your social presence, you have to pay attention to what your target audience likes and responds to.

If you post twice a day, but don’t get as many likes on the second post each day, then you should likely reduce the frequency to one post a day.

Most social media platforms provide analytics that you can keep track of on your posts. These numbers can tell you lots of valuable information, which then enable you to make strategic decisions about your social media marketing strategies.

Another example, if your business is a bakery, and you’ve noticed that you get more shares on content with your cupcakes and not your cakes, you probably need to change something. It doesn’t mean you need to stop selling cakes, but maybe there’s a key difference in the cupcake versus cake posts that are causing the cupcake posts to be more popular.

Ignoring your audience’s responses and posting any and everything is a one-way ticket to failure. You have to listen to your audience, and respond accordingly to grow your social presence.

Use hashtags

Something many businesses forget to take advantage of is the use of hashtags. These are tags on your post that help put your content in front of the people looking for it.

If your business is a traditional Italian restaurant, try using hashtags that relate to it like #ItalianFood or #traditionalItalianfood. You can most likely search social media platforms for different hashtags to see what fits your business best.

Part of using hashtags is making sure you use the right ones as well, and not too many. In the same Italian restaurant example, you shouldn’t use #restaurant because it is too broad, and will likely fall into a crowd of other restaurants.

Another bad hashtag example would be #traditionalMexicanfood. For obvious reasons, you sell Italian food, not Mexican food. Not only would this be false advertising, but it will bring your posts up to the wrong audience.

Above all, know your audience

The most important thing in growing your social presence is knowing your audience. If you don’t, none of the above advice will help you.

You can use all the hashtags in the world, post regularly, and post relative and engaging content, but if you aren’t posting what works for your audience, it’ll be a wasted effort.

Don’t be afraid to do research, and put yourself in the consumer’s shoes if you need help with this. It may seem like a lot, but it isn’t as hard as you might think. Happy posting!

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