8 Tips to Grow Your Audience and Stand Out on Social Media

No matter what your niche is, today, your business must have a social media presence. It’s simple, the more people you reach online the better your chances are to engage them and grow your business as a result. But, that would only happen if you develop a substantial social following for your company and give the target users the content that they want.

To make social media work for your business, you must grow your audience and stand out across social media platforms. However, increasing social media audiences and followers is not as easy as it looks. You’ll have the competitors in your industry that are trying to do the same and audiences that are more content-savvy than ever.

That’s why we compiled the best tips to stand out online and be on your way to grow your audience.

1. Plan and Strategize

If you want to succeed with social media marketing, the first thing that you need to do is to develop a social media strategy If you don’t, you’ll publish something random and hope that someone will randomly read your content. If you know your target audiences and if you have a plan to capture their attention, standing out on social media is pretty straightforward.

Determining Target Audience

The first step of your social media strategy should be to determine your target audience. Your business must have a unique audience and demographic identity. To define your target audience’s demographics across the social media platforms that you target for your business, you need to know how the demographics work on each of the main social networks today.

The social media landscape is vast and ever-changing, with new platforms popping up all the time. You can’t possibly be active on all of them! And quite frankly, your target audience won’t either. Even firms who specifically seek out a highly socially active consumer admit that they’ll only need to focus their efforts on certain platforms for now ( Facebook being one).

Facebook

Facebook has 1.93 billion daily active users and it’s arguably the biggest social media network today. The platform may not have the attention of younger audiences like Instagram and Snapchat do, but 79% of the users still log in.

If you know where your core audience can be located, you’ll be able to create your advantage on Facebook. In fact, Facebook allows you to select specific regions to market your content and locate users by country, state, or region. The top countries with Facebook users are:

Facebook was initially developed as a platform for college students, so it is expected that graduates are the most present users in terms of educational demographics.

To market on Facebook, it is useful to know how much your audience can spend on your product. Knowing Facebook users income statistics will come in handy:

Instagram

Since July 2018, Instagram has nearly 1.2 billion active users daily. With the power of hashtags, stories, and advertising, Instagram became a real driving force for businesses that want to grow their social presence.

Since its start, Instagram is a platform that is generally used by younger audiences. However, new statistics show that older generations started to embrace Instagram too. The dominant gender of all users are men with 50.7%.

Users that are located in the USA still outnumber other Instagram users across the world.

With its carousel image advertising, Instagram also provides you with the power to promote your products. However, to make it work, you need to make sure that you target the audience with the right purchasing power.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most useful platforms when it comes to content sharing, customer service, and engagement of target users. As one of the fast-paced platforms, Twitter offers various information for different target users. The millennial generation still tends to be the biggest on Twitter. The US is still the dominant demographic with over 77% of overall users.

College graduates are more dominant than high-school graduates, and adults that make over $75,000 are the dominant buying power users on the platform.

LinkedIn

Still the biggest social network for professionals and business users, with 2.89 billionactive monthly users.

Besides enthusiastic young professionals, the LinkedIn usage from 46+ year olds is the highest.

The US is the dominant demographic with over 180 million users, followed by India with 83 million.

Understandably, more than 50% on LinkedIn have a college diploma and 45% of users make over $75,000 per year.

Pinterest

This is a growing social network for businesses that want to express their content and products visually. The platform started as a place for younger audiences, but according to the latest data, older users have started to use the platform.

The majority of Pinterest users are women, the biggest education level among users is college graduation, and most of the users make over $50,000 per year.

Set Social Media Goals

To start and sustain your social media growth, you need to set your social media goals first. Social media goals are similar to your New Year’s resolution goals – you need to do everything that you can to achieve them. By tracking your progress, you’ll think of more tactics that will help you achieve your social media goals.

The point is, to achieve your social media goals, you need to stay committed. This commitment will only be achieved when you’re sure that the goals matter for your business and when you’re convinced that they’re obtainable. The most common goal setting technique is called S-M-A-R-T, short for:

• Specific: Clearly defined goals.
• Measurable: Goals that can be monitored and analyzed.
• Achievable: Can you achieve your goals with the resources at hand?
• Realistic: With your schedule, team, and resources are those goals realistic?
• Time-sensitive: You’ll need an exact timeframe for your goals.

When you set social media goals, you’ll want to start with something broad, such as:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Improving ROI
• Developing loyal audiences
• Improve sales

You can also set different goals for each social network. You can combine and track more goals together, for example, if your social media awareness and your sales are increased, the rise may be connected to the two.

If you want to stand out on social media, you’ll need to increase your brand awareness. If we take Brand Awareness as a goal, according to the S-M-A-R-T methodology, we can formulate it like this:

• Specific: Increasing brand awareness for your social media accounts.
• Measurable: The brand awareness will be increased by a minimum of 10% per month. The post reach should have nothing less than 1500 impressions.
• Achievable: Yes, it is obtainable.
• Realistic: By boosting your posts and utilizing efficient content sharing tactics, it is realistic.
• Time-sensitive: In 12 months, 200% of brand awareness increase should be attained.

Developing a Content Plan

If you can’t create the content that social media users crave, it will be hard to attract and keep them as your followers. This is why you must have a content marketing plan that details the content that you’ll create for your social media strategies. A plan will save you lots of time because you’ll know exactly what to do before you start creating the content. There are several steps to develop a successful social media content plan.

1. Analyze Social Media Channels

First of all, assess your social media presence. See where you’re most active and receive the most engagement and where you aren’t. Less is more, make sure that you remove any social media channel that’s not working for you. Each social media network has its own strengths and weaknesses:

• Facebook – Geared towards news and entertainment with a strong accent on video content.
• Instagram – Visual network for static images and short videos. It’s not the best social network for driving web traffic but it is most convenient for strongly visual brands.
• Twitter – Inclined towards worldwide news and social engagement around them. The reshare is highly encouraged and it is excellent for promoting blog posts and web content.
• LinkedIn – Professional network suitable for professional-looking content (case studies, analysis, business news). It is mainly used to recruit employees, form business relationships and share industry-related content.
• Pinterest – A visual platform where strong imagery is an asset. It is excellent as an inspirational canvas.

Here’s an outline of the type of content that is acceptable on each of the social networks above.

• Facebook: Text, images, videos, links
• Instagram: Images, videos
• Twitter: Text, images, videos, links
• LinkedIn: Text, images, videos, links
• Pinterest: Images, videos, links

After you review each social platform, you need to ask yourself if you’re creating the content that you need to succeed on that network. If you don’t, you’ll need a team of content writers, designers, and video editors that can help you out.

2. Perform a Competitive Analysis

To stand out on social media, you need to spend a lot of time researching your competitors. You need to review your competitors’ strategies and tactics. After that, you need to prepare your own strategy which might be an enhanced version of theirs.

In your niche, you must be aware of who your competitors on social media are. If you’re not, you can discover them in your social channel by searching related keywords for your niche. You can search them on Facebook:

You can repeat the process for the other networks and collect your biggest competitors in a list.

On Google:

You can also set up Google Alerts for your industry-related keywords:

The main points that you need to keep an eye on when you thoroughly analyze your competitors are:

• Content: What type of content do they use on the platforms?
• Engagement: The number of likes, comments, shares.
• Post Frequency: How many times a day/week do they post content?
• Where they are successful/unsuccessful: Figure out where they’re good and where not.

After your competitive analysis is done, you need to learn what you cant from their strategies and develop your own version and how you can do better than them.

You can always share content that is more relevant, you can always create more quality content and you can always alter your post frequency/consistency.

To stand out from your competitors, you need to include your own unique touch in your social media strategy. This can be everything, from your unique point of view and opinion to a comment on a popular industry topic.

3. Discover Your Brand Voice

If you know your target audience, you have to know how to talk to them. But, you must do it with your own brand voice. Having a brand voice is vital if you want to stay consistently recognizable from your consumers. You need to have your own word that summarizes your brand, related to the benefits of your products, the personality of your brand and your main purpose as a company.

Examples of brands with an excellent brand voice would be:

Old Spice

Cheeky, manly, and funny – that is embodied in every Old Spice social media post and commercial. Whether you use the product or just read their social feeds, they’re as consistent as a brand can be.

Gary Vaynerchuck

In the marketing world, there’s not a better motivator than Gary Vee. His honesty is a part of his brand voice and it’s been carried out in his social media posts and videos too. He is authentic and consistent on every social media platform.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bmw_MmFg6lS/?hl=en&taken-by=garyvee

4. Determining The Content that You’ll Create

You need to determine the type of social media content that you’re going to create.. To do so, , make sure you answer these three questions:

• What type of content will I create?
• How will I create it?
• Why will I create it?

To answer these questions, you’ll need to know the purpose of your content. Do you want to entertain your customers, inform them, or you just want to promote your products/services?

Writing and Designing for Social Media

Social media posts are not just about putting out an image and writing a sentence on top of it. From a business standpoint, a social media post needs to be so much more than that. It needs to be carefully written and designed in order to attract the viewer immediately.

Here are the recommended copy sizes for the main social media networks:

• Facebook: Up to 40 characters
• Instagram: 3 Lines or less (captions)
• Twitter: Up to 100 characters
• LinkedIn: Not more than 600 characters
• Pinterest: 100 to 200 characters

According to HubSpot, these are the acceptable social media sharing image sizes for the main social media networks:

The main types of image posts that you can create for your social media feeds are:

• Infographics: You need to develop infographics that are optimized for your social media channels. This requires you to follow the correct sizes to make the infographic readable on each platform. If the infographic is too large, you can always share it via a link from your website.
• Image Quotes: People want to be inspired, especially when they scroll through their social feeds. That’s why we see such a substantial amount of social media quotes on every network. If you really want to stand out, you must create a unique design with unique quotes for your business.

• Photography: Another thing that people want to see on social media are people. But not those cheesy stock photo people. We talk about real employees, real smiles, events, and successes. Hire a photographer for a photo shoot or have a DSLR camera always on hand for every occasion.

Developing Video Content

If you want to take a step further than images and graphics, video content is your best bet for an increased social media engagement. It’s hard to grab people’s attention in a world where there is so much content. You have to compete with all these other advertisers for space on phone or computer screens. One way to stand out might be through interactive video content. New research has found that video ads hold interest 5x more than still images do and can help brands gain awareness without paying top dollar (or even middle-ground rates).

Today, video is the most important content on almost every social media platform. However, each social network has its own guidelines and recommended best practices:

• Facebook: You can upload them natively or via YouTube/Vimeo link. The ideal length for attention and engagement is a video that is not longer than 45 seconds.
• Instagram: The videos. that you can post on Instagram, have a limit of1 minute but with the IGTV, Instagram now allows you to upload longer videos.
• Twitter: Just like on Facebook, you can upload videos natively on Twitter too and record them with the app. Just make sure that you edit them to be up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds long, with a maximum size of 512 MB.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn used to not allow users to upload videos. They realized their mistake and now, LinkedIn became the main platform where consultants upload their videos on different industry topics.
• Pinterest: You can share videos from YouTube and upload short videos.

Just like for your articles, infographic, case studies and other types of content, you must have video topics as well. The most viewed videos for businesses include the following topics:

• How-to videos
• Behind-the-scenes company videos
• Product videos
• Event coverage
• Recruiting videos to attract employees
• Videos that answer common customer service complaints

5. Have a Social Calendar and Posting Strategy

When you post your content on social media, you need to be organized. For this purpose, you’ll need a calendar spreadsheet where you’ll enter different types of content that you’ll post for various days.

After your calendar is finished, you need to determine which is the best time to post your content on your social accounts. According to SproutSocial, these are the best times to post on the main social media platforms:

Facebook

• The best times to post on Facebook are Wednesday at noon and 2 p.m. and Thursday at 1 and 2 p.m.
• Thursday is the best day to post on Facebook in the week.
• The safest times to post include weekdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Saturday has the least amount of engagement for Facebook in the week.
• Evenings and early mornings have the least amount of engagement in the day.

Instagram

• The best time to post on Instagram is Wednesday at 3 p.m., Thursday at 5 a.m., 11 a.m., and 3 to 4 p.m. and Friday at 5 a.m.
• Thursday is the best day to post on Instagram.
• The safest times to post to Instagram are Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Sunday is the least engaging day for Instagram.

Twitter

• The best time to post on Twitter is Friday 9 to 10 a.m.
• Friday is the best day to post to Twitter.
• The safest times to post a Tweet are every day from 10 a.m. to noon.
• Sunday mornings receive the least amount of engagement.

LinkedIn

• The best time to post on LinkedIn is Wednesday 3 to 5 p.m.
• Wednesday is the best day to post to LinkedIn.
• Engagement varies per day, but Tuesday through Thursday rank best.
• Friday through Monday receive the least amount of engagement.

Every platform has its own built-in analytics:

• Facebook Insights
• LinkedIn Analytics for Company Pages
• Google+ Insights
• Twitter Audience Insights
• Instagram Business Tools for Brands
• Pinterest Analytics

The metrics that you need to pay attention to regarding your social networks’ posting success are:

To track if your social media efforts are bringing traffic to your web content, you can use Google Analytics too. Log into your account. Click Acquisition. Then, click Social.

2. Grow Your Facebook Reach

Growing your Facebook reach and the number of followers can be difficult, especially with the constantly reduced organic reach. But it’s not impossible!

Share the Right Stuff

If you want to stand among brands, groups, and people’s friends content, you must post the right content for your audience. Here’s how to do it right:

• Balance Sales with Storytelling – Yes, there’s no greater social network today, but that doesn’t mean that you should act like you’re fishing and know that someone will be convinced from your sales copy. You need to use storytelling and convince people that you’re more than just a business.

• Teach and Amuse – If you want to have a good social media reputation, you need to educate your fans on how to fulfill their objectives and on other topics that are related to your niche. In other words, you must provide value. You need posts that are educational and entertaining at the same time.
• Less is More – The average attention span of people is only eight seconds, a second faster than a goldfish’s. Also, people read about 20-28% of the words in your post. So when writing your post, focus on the first three to four words.
• Use Links – You can’t convey every message in just one or two sentences. Sometimes, those lines must be the introduction to an awesome piece of content.
• Use CTAs: Make sure that the CTA of your Facebook posts is aligned with the content that you offer. You need to make it clear for the users on what you want them to do. If you want to bring more awareness, you’ll need to ask them to share your post.
• Be Original: Posts with original photos have an organic and personal feel. You want to humanize your brand and connect with your customers. If you use generic images, you’re working against that objective. Be authentic.

Enhance Organic Reach

Advertising is good, but sometimes, companies don’t have the budget for it. Organic is always better and can form a stronger relationship. But Facebook made the organic reach difficult for page owners. However, that shouldn’t be an excuse. Here’s how to improve your Facebook organic reach:

• Have Q&A Sessions: Users will want to come back if you offer talks and Q&A sessions on a weekly basis. You just need to offer them the topic and announce the discussion upfront and on different channels. Bringing users in through Q&A sessions is an excellent way to increase engagement and bring more people organically.
• Bring People from Other Places: There’s nothing wrong with letting your Instagram fans, Twitter, and LinkedIn followers know that you have a Facebook page. You can also add a social button or even a Facebook feed on your website.
• Schedule Posts: When you know when it is the right time to post content on Facebook, you need to use it to the max. Your content needs to be posted consistently, so make sure that you schedule your posts with Hootsuite or Buffer.

Advertise

It’s no longer a secret that Facebook collects data from its users. Data that includes demographics, educational level, interests, hobbies, and much more. This information is available for you to set up your target audience if you opt for Facebook Advertising.

There are two main options to use Facebook Advertising:

• Facebook ads
• Power Editor

The Ads creator has fewer features than the Power Editor, and the Power Editor has the following options:

• Developing/advertise unpublished posts
• Filtering by campaign
• Creating bulk advertisements
• Using Audiences to make “Saved Target Groups,” “Custom Audiences,” and “Lookalike Audiences”

You can choose the following objectives for your Facebook advertising campaign:

• Page Post Engagement: Promoting page posts
• Page Likes: Get Page likes to grow your audience
• Clicks to Websites: Get clicks for your website
• Website Conversions: Get people to perform actions on your site (requires adding a Facebook pixel to your site)
• App Installs: Get people to install your mobile or desktop app
• App Engagement: Get people to use your desktop app
• Event Responses: Increase attendance at your event
• Offer Claims: Create offers for people to redeem in your store

After you choose the advertising goal, you need to set up the Ad budget. You can set a budget on a daily or lifetime basis, and pick start and end dates of your advertisement. When you pick the budget for your ad, it’s time to choose your target audience. Facebook is brilliant if you want to segment who you’re targeting. There are just a few of the segmentation choices:

• Location
• Age
• Interests
• Gender
• Languages
• Education Level
• Relationship Status
• Political Views
• Whether or not they like/follow your page

You can also import your own information to create custom audiences and target users by:

• Email address
• Phone number
• User ID
• Mobile advertiser ID
• People who visited your website

In a nutshell, if done right, Facebook Advertising has the power to grow your audience and fan base. But your job is not done only with the ad. You need to engage the people that you brought to your fan page because relationship building is really what’s all about.

3. Master Instagram

It is one of the most relevant social platforms and definitely a place where you can stand out and grow your audience. The engagement rate is pretty high and the competition for attention is ferocious. But if you use the right strategy to master Instagram, you can build your audience on the platform.

Get More Engaging Followers

What’s better than more followers? Followers that engage with your account, of course. You don’t want just more audience, you want a positive ROI out of it. And no, you don’t have to pay and buy your followers, you just need the following tips:

• Optimize Your Account: Use the bio for your web link or your brand promotion/campaign. This is the only spot where you can insert a link beside your Instagram stories, so make sure that you use it properly. Also, you need to keep your username search friendly and recognizable.
• Stay Consistent: Have a regular posting schedule. You shouldn’t post more than a few times a day, but whatever your frequency is, keep it consistent.
• Get Reshared: Reach out to larger Instagram accounts in your industry to share your content with their audience. Find marketing collaborations and co-marketing plans to build your audience.
• Post What Audiences Want: You need to learn what content your followers want to see on the platforms. Some content performs better than other, it’s as simple as that.
• Visually Stand Out: You need to utilize Instagram’s visual appeal to your advantage. You want to put your product, services or employees in the best light, so you can’t afford to have low-quality images and the wrong layout.

Figure out Hashtags

Hashtags are the main “currency” on Instagram if you want to increase your post reach. To make them work for your business, you need to know how to use hashtags strategically. Hashtags are what make people discover your content on the platform and bring new followers to your account.

There are 2 major types of Instagram hashtags that you can use for your brand:

• Branded hashtags: Specific to your company and that contain your brand name, your products or a specific campaign.
• Community hashtags: General hashtags that are not necessarily related to your company. They’re widely used by the majority of users.

With the power of hashtags, you can engage users towards your brand. You can encourage them to post a picture with your branded hashtag and then reshare it on your account.

The users will know that they have a chance to get a shout-out on your account, and as a result, they’ll post more content with your branded hashtag. This will help you significantly in building your follower base.

Besides enhancing your brand, hashtags can help new users to discover you. When a user searches through a hashtag, it tells Instagram to showcase the latest posts from that hashtag. So, if you use the specific hashtag, Instagram will display you in the latest posts if someone searches that hashtag at that time of the day when you post your photo.

Building a community is a natural thing to do on Instagram via sharing content, tagging, and the use of hashtags. On the platform, you need to aim for a robust online community and build partnerships in your niche.

Experiment with hashtags and learn what performs the best for your brand. You need to track your efforts and optimize them even more for a greater engagement.

4. Have a Twitter Strategy

Everything moves quickly on Twitter. That’s why beating the competition and standing out is much harder on this social network. To succeed with Twitter, you’ll need a strategy.

Optimize Your Profile

Prove to users that you’re a human being who understands them. Have a clean profile photo, a bio with relevant keywords and a personality/brand voice.

The Bio

Your bio is one of the most noticeable things that people notice when they decide whether or not to follow you. So you need it to be good enough to make people follow you.

• Tell People What You Do: If you’re not Nike or Microsoft, please don’t be mysterious. Tell people exactly what your business does in the bio. And don’t make it too long, if you struggle with 160 characters, you may need to re-examine your entire content strategy too.

• Have a CTA: You just need a quick and short description of why people should click the link in your bio. Ask them to check out your special offer or become a part of your brand movement.

• Spread Branded Hashtags: If you have a branded hashtag that people can use, make sure that you include it in your bio to spread awareness about the branded campaign.

 

• Be Funny: Humor can give you just the edge that is required to intrigue people and catch their interest.

Simple Tactics to Increase Twitter Following

A higher number of followers can increase your Twitter influence and push more people to open your content and engage with your account. Here’s how to bring more followers for your Twitter handle.

Tweet More Frequently

Using Twitter requires a more intensified frequency than Facebook or LinkedIn. As stated by CoSchedule, it is best to have one to five tweets per day to maximize your engagement rate. However, since the feed moves fast, it may even require more tweets to capture your audience’s attention.

You need to always fill your Twitter feed with fresh content and let your followers know that you’re active and want to engage with them. To keep up with the sharing frequency, you can use Tweetdeck or Buffer to schedule tweets.

Be Visual

Visual tweets get the most engagement because images make Twitter users stop and check out what’s in the post more than text does. Even a blog post featured image can do the job.

GIFs also work brilliantly too, because they give even more context than images.

Video content is three times more likely to be shared than any other type of content, so make sure that you use it on Twitter too.

Use the Right Hashtags

Twitter practically invented the hashtag. And just like in Instagram, the hashtag is the currency here and it is how your content becomes findable. Having at least one or two hashtags for each tweet will increase the chances of new followers to find your account. You need to use your industry hashtags, content related hashtags or branded hashtags.

 

 

Retweet and Reply

You can’t just post your own content and expect a surge of engagement all of the sudden. You must put in the work and earn it. That’s why you need to regularly engage with users via tagging, retweeting, commenting, and replying to tweets. This humanizes your brand and makes users more aware that there are people behind it instead of bots.

 

Again, we must mention that the number of followers is not as important as the number of followers that engage with your brand. Think of it as building a community, instead of building a following.

5. Give Your LinkedIn Presence a Boost

It’s a lot easier to get clients on LinkedIn by having a larger audience. There are lots of ways to build your LinkedIn following. But it takes consistent work. LinkedIn is an investment that can pay off for your business in the long run.

Your Company Page

Make sure that you have a complete Company page, with an optimized bio, profile image, cover image, and your web link.

Next up, you can include a social button to your LinkedIn page on your website and start promoting it from your other social accounts.

Spread the word through your employees and tell them to promote and tag your LinkedIn page when they share an article from the website, a job opportunity, or another offer.

Leverage Team Member Connections

Employees can be your best company ambassadors on LinkedIn. You need to ask from employees to share and engage with your content, which will extend the brand’s reach on the platform.

When employees engage with your Company and Showcase Page content, that engagement extends to the feeds of your employees’ connections in their LinkedIn profiles. As their networks grow, so too does your reach, and over time, your company’s follower count.

It is advisable to also encourage employees to grow their professional networks, taking advantage of relevant connection opportunities with peers, partners, sales prospects, and customers when they arise. This will benefit them, your business, and your LinkedIn reach too.

Advertise

Advertising is an excellent way to quickly grow your community on LinkedIn. The easiest way to do this is by promoting a post which data shows will drive strong engagement from your target audience.

Sponsored Content posts also feature a “Follow” button users can click, since the Sponsored Content will often be displayed to users who don’t currently follow your Company Page.

6. Live Stream Your Content

Video live streaming on social platforms is the new way to explain products and services, but it’s not always easy. To succeed with video marketing campaigns you need a witty tone of voice that’ll keep your customer engaged!

Live streaming is a direct and personal connection between the creator’s brand and their audience. They have a lot of potential when it comes to business. Imagine if you could get front row seats at an Apple keynote event through your live chat and other participatory live streaming tools? Well, almost paradoxically, with high quality audio/video there is much more engagement from each audience member since they feel as though the person on stage speaks to them personally.

Streaming is all the rage, but it can be tough for beginners. There are a lot of things you need to get started with streaming including live camera equipment and editing software that will help produce high quality content.
There are a few basics to do live streaming properly. Full HD 1080p is the minimum for high quality, professional streaming video. You’ll also want to choose a solution that supports cloud transcoding so viewers can enjoy beautiful images on any device. Also, make sure you use alternatives to broaden your reach. you’ll need to find a platform that simulcasts to other platforms like Youtube Live, Facebook Live, Twitter, and Twitch.

In addition, keep in mind that businesses need secure video streaming to keep their customers engaged. Look for platforms with features that allow privacy, authorization and customization such as restrictions on embedding or security. This way, you’ll ensure the integrity of your event experience from start to finish.

Related: 8 Ways Your Company Can Benefit from B2B Live Video Streaming

7. Go Viral

Every social media marketer’s dream is to go viral with the content and “blow up the internet”! But the problem is that only a small percent of the content online really goes viral. That can be your content too if you follow the guidelines for social media virality:

Create Content for High Engagement

Social media networks have algorithms that rank content based on the likelihood that the user will engage. Content that is expected to make the followers engage will be ranked higher in the algorithm-optimized feed, and content that is expected to be less engaging will be ranked lower.

Content that creates engagement is rewarded by being liked and shared by other users and on the contrary, content that does not create engagement gets forgotten in the feeds.

For virality, you should focus on creating content that has high engagement, since it will have greater reach and is thus more likely to be re-shared. Your best bet is to use visual content in your social media posts because it is the content that users want to interact the most with.

In fact, Buzzsumo did a study of over 100 million and detected several similarities between the most shared content. One of those similarities is visuals. They discovered that posts with one or more images get more than twice as many shares on Facebook and Twitter than those without images.

Post at the Right Time

Timing is everything in social media. You can’t expect to have a viral post if you share it when your target audience sleeps or is not online at all. The timing of your sharing will depend heavily on your target audience but, you need to make sure that you follow the guidelines about the best time to share that we’ve outlined above.

Ask Users to Share and Re-share

Don’t be shy. Make it clear that you want more people to see your post if you think that they’ll benefit from doing so. Encourage your audience to take the action and be the part of the movement themselves.

Outreach to Influencers

Outreaching to influencers is not easy. You risk being labeled as a spammer every time you send them a message. That’s why you need to start communicating with these people prior to your outreach, not just when you want to have viral content.

Start your interaction with:

• Connecting with them via social media
• Sharing their content
• Mentioning their social handles in posts
• Linking to their content in your posts
• Sending them messages to let them know that the content is helpful
• Including them in your expert roundup post/article

8. Continuously Engage

One of the best ways, if not the best, to build a big social media presence is to engage with your followers. The more engagement you create, the more social media algorithms will push your content forward.

What Does it Take to Create Engaging Social Media Post?

Social media content provides a chance to reach out to a large number of people and increase brand awareness. The key to social media success is an engaged audience. It’s quality, not just quantity that you should strive for as a business!

So, what is the formula for engagement? Quality content, compelling visuals, and something that entices users to write a comment, like, or share the content. To make sure that you have an engaging social media post, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my content make people curious? – Social media posts have to engage users and make them want to learn more. You often can’t rely on 140 characters to fully explain one of your marketing landing pages. That’s why you need to pique their interest with a visual and a CTA
• Do I have unique content? – Do you post something that makes you stand out? Or do you post the same content as everyone else in your industry? Remember that people want to engage with something honest, attractive, and unique first.

Developing an engaged audience can be really challenging. But it’s definitely not impossible and it is the ultimate social media goal that you should aim for. Analyze your content, post times and publishing habits, and you’ll eventually find what works for you and what needs to be improved. It is always good to work with a calendar for social media, so here is a sample FREE Social Media calendar template.

Wrapping Up

To sum up, planning and strategizing are critical before everything else if you want to achieve social media growth. The other component that matters is engagement, and you must spark it and perform it across all of your social media channels.

Bottom line, if you don’t opt for the tips above, your social media growth is almost impossible. Work hard to stand out! Constantly share valuable content, develop a community that interacts with your brand voice, monitor your progress, and before you know it, you’ll have a social media presence that is limitless and unique.