Social Media Growth Strategy: 15 Secrets You Need To Know

Do you want to grow your social media channels but don’t know where to start? So don’t worry. We will give you 15 secrets that can help you grow your online presence on social media.

Social media is a great tool that can help business owners to grow their businesses online. By growing organically and consistently engaging with your target audiences, you can get lots of rewards such as increasing your brand loyalty, increasing your followers, improving customer care, boosting SEO, etc.

Difference between organic and paid growth of social media channels

We know it as organic social media growth when your social media account grows without doing any paid advertisement. Organic social media growth involves strategic actions, for instance, regularly engaging with your audience, targeting the right audience, offering value to them, building community, and so on, which we will talk about in this post.

On the other side, when a social media channel grows through an effective paid advertising campaign, we are known as paid social media growth.

Here’s an overview of 15 secrets about which you will learn today.

1. Select the right social media channel
2. Have an effective social strategy to grow
3. Make your social media accounts memorable
4. Target the right audience
5. Decide what will make your social channel unique
6. Stalk your competitors
7. Identify the best times to post
8. Offer value to your audience
9. Use hashtags effectively
10. Create a consistent posting schedule
11. Create questions and polls and tickle your audience’s curiosity
12. Create contests and incentives
13. Write attention-grabbing headlines
14. Become part of several social communities
15. Tap into influencer marketing

1. Select the right social media channel

There are different social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube,  Facebook, etc. To grow the business in the right direction, it is essential to select the right social media channel suitable for your business type. For this, you need to look at your audience and content and figure out the best social media channel for your business. For example, Boatwright shares, “For us, we’ve had the most success with Facebook because that’s where most of the parents of our students interact with us.”

If you find yourself logging on to LinkedIn for your business or agency, keep Subramanian’s advice in mind: “The best way to drive traffic is to build a solid network in the same industry that you operate in. For example, if you are an SEO expert, you need to have a network of content experts and marketing managers.”

Similarly, Instagram and Facebook are not suitable for organic traffic because you need to pay for ads to get more audience. So instead, Facebook wants to show users only the most engaging content and drop everything else. Known as the News Feed Algorithm, it brings to mind another particular algorithm.

By doing consistent and quality posting on Twitter and using relevant hashtags, you can get targeted traffic to your site. In addition, you can use Twitter as a traffic and lead generator channel if you don’t have a budget for advertising.

Social media is adopting its form of SEO in a way that promotes a positive user experience. This algorithm works by putting your posts in a pool as small as one percent of your followers. Then, if those people engage with the content, it gets introduced into a larger pool. So more and more people slowly see it, but only if it’s engaging.

2. Have an effective social strategy to grow

Audiences love giveaways, discounts, and freebies, and that’s not likely to change no matter what new developments arise on social media. But what marketers post is not always what consumers want. This mismatch means that marketers have missed opportunities to create social content.

So before entering the market, it is essential to have some strategy through which you can grow organically.

You need to work with your social media marketing strategy where you can kind prospect leads and the best organic traffic for your website.

3. Make your social media accounts memorable.

Make sure you include your company logo as your profile page image and use your branding colors to highlight your profiles where it makes sense. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have your company mission statement where your followers can easily read it.

4. Target the right audience

First things, you must know your audience and not just characterize your audience based on a hunch or presumption, but rather on analytical data and digital reports that identify key demographic data on your audience. Knowing your audience helps you target and court other like-minded social media followers.

While identifying the perceived target market, it is also essential to consider what each demographic is looking for when they follow your account. For example, studies show that much fewer young people use Facebook instead of their older counterparts. Based on this, if your target market is primarily above the age of 50, a suggested practice would be to focus heavily on building your Facebook presence.

On the other hand, if one’s target market is below 25, Instagram is a better platform. Since niche markets already have an engaged customer base, this is a great entry point for new social media pages. For example, if a startup retail business selling candles is attempting to grow their Instagram following organically, they have an easy entry point to the niche market of candle making.

5. Decide what will make your social channel unique.

Do proper analysis and decide what can make your social channel unique and can create a difference in your followers’ lives. Ask yourself: what’s something special that my audience will get from my social channel. The service you provide is a solution to a pain point, something that you can offer that will either help resolve what they want to accomplish or, at the very least, give them guidance on where to begin. The post needs to call out you, the audience, the outcome they want to achieve, and how the service you provide will solve it.

6. Stalk your competitors

Monitoring your competitors can give you an insight. How they are engaging their audience, what strategies they are following, and which social platform they are investing in the most.

You also can monitor your competitors straight from some social network platforms. Add competitors to your Pages to Watch section of insights on Facebook, create Twitter Lists and use LinkedIn’s competitor analysis tool. For the most in-depth analysis of every social network, invest in a third-party social listening tool (e.g., Sprout Social, Hubspot, Oktopost).

Tracking these statistics allows you to compare your engagement and posts with your competitors to help you continuously improve and optimize your brand’s organic social strategy.

7. Identify the best times to post

Generally, it isn’t easy to pinpoint to post on social media at the right time. Because it is constantly changing and it depends on the unique audience. However, existing data can help start points. According to Sprout Social’s data, here are the best times to post on each network:

Facebook:

Noon and 2 p.m. Wednesdays

1 to 2 p.m. Thursdays

It’s also generally safe to post from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays.

Instagram:

3 p.m. Wednesdays

5 and 11 a.m., and 3 to 4 p.m. Thursdays

5 a.m. Fridays

It’s also safe to post between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.

Twitter:

9 to 10 a.m. Fridays

It’s also safe to post from 10 a.m. to noon daily.

LinkedIn:

3 to 5 p.m. Wednesdays

You can also see great engagement any time, Tuesday through Thursday.

Considering all of these factors, it’s crucial to test and optimize to find what works best for organic audience growth. Use the research data as a starting point and fine-tune as you go.

Depending on the niche, you can post 2-3 times a day or perhaps a couple of times a week. Your audience will know that you are active on social media and will begin to look for your posts.”

8. Offer value to your audience

You’ll build credibility when you focus on providing value for your audience instead of promoting yourself. And in turn, credibility leads to conversions.

The more value you bring, the more people your audience will grow and stick around.

9. Use hashtags effectively

Using the right hashtags makes your content easily searchable on a platform bombarded with other content. This increases the chance that a more targeted audience sees it and gives you a follow. For example, if you’re sharing a piece of content on social media tips, then hashtags that make sense are #SocialMedia or #SocialMediaTips. Hashtags that don’t make as much sense are #Content or #Media, etc. A tip is to go on Twitter and search hashtags to see how popular they are.

10. Create a consistent posting schedule

Consistency is the only key to driving success on any social media platform.

The best tip for driving traffic, leads, and growth from social media is to make sure that you have a consistent posting schedule,” shares Taylor Wilson of Movers Chicago.

11. Create questions and polls and tickle your audience’s curiosity

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram allow you to post specific polls and questions. Although LinkedIn and Pinterest don’t have specific features to create a poll, you can still ask open-ended questions. Formatting your posts shows that you want to hear from your followers and care about their opinions.

When social media content leaves viewers fully satisfied, it is less likely that they will take the additional step of visiting your website and converting. However, when the content acts as a tease that inspires curiosity, it is likely to compel that viewer to visit your site and potentially help generate conversations.

12. Create contests and incentives

While you’re posting to social media, you’re also taking time to interact with people. Engage with other peoples’ content and respond to people tweeting at you, commenting on your posts, resharing your content, and directly message you. Facilitating correspondence will increase favorability with people so that they will be more inclined to follow you and become a part of your network. Sometimes you can create a contest and give them some incentives too. It can enhance your reach by word of mouth and make them happy.

However you develop contests and incentives, make sure they meet your company’s goals, and provide value to your audience. When your content — and contests — speak to what your audience wants, people will organically gravitate toward your brand.

13. Write attention-grabbing headlines

When you write attention-grabbing headlines, it creates more traffic to your social media channels.

“The most important thing for driving leads and traffic from social media is a stellar headline,” opines Unseen Japan’s Jay Allen.

14. Become part of several social communities

The best tip for driving traffic, leads, and growth from organic social media marketing is by establishing a presence in various communities, for example,

Facebook groups,” shares Boundary’s Jason Akatiff.

A great way to increase engagement is to tag others in your posts. For example, did your company recently do some charity work with a local organization? Post about it and tag them—this will expand your reach to include their audience and followers and your own.

15. Tap into influencer marketing

Partnering with the right industry influencers is one of the most effective ways to grow an engaged social media audience organically. Why? Because it’s the highest form of word-of-mouth. Your brand is now front-and-center for the influencer’s dedicated, loyal and engaged followers to discover. However, before you start looking for the right influencer, you must decide on the goal and expectations from this collaboration.

Your audience must trust and respect the influencer you choose, so they must share a creative vision, tone, values, and content relevant to your audience and your brand.

Final thoughts

We hope these 15 points mentioned above will help you organically increase your social media reach. Along with the stated, don’t forget to regularly analyze your content performance with your competitors. This will help you detect the flaws in your strategies too.

Organic social remains an ideal method to build brand awareness and loyalty and foster engagement with your audience within a comprehensive social media marketing strategy.

When working with influencers or running a contest, your focus should always be on honest engagement with your users. The more relevant the content, the more people will see your content — and the more organic growth your social media presence will experience.

Do you also want to read about the successful digital marketer, Digital Deepak? Who is earning in crores.