For your social media marketing to prove successful, you must have an audience and growing an audience doesn’t happen overnight. Unfortunately, building a reliable audience is one of the most difficult tasks for any business. Not only are you competing with several brands for potential audience attention but also against their online keyboard warriors.

Sometimes, trying to build your online presence might sound like yelling to the wind. You might constantly be posting photos, trying to engage others but nothing comes forth. This is certainly frustrating. Well, don’t worry as below are some solid strategies that will help you grow an engaged social media audience for your brand and products.

Planning and Strategy

For anything to be a success, there must be a plan. For this, begin by planning and strategizing to avoid falling in empty traps of aimlessly posting content and engaging randomly with an unreliable audience. Your plan and strategy should detail who you are targeting and how you plan to reach them.

The first step is identifying your target audience. You ought to figure out who you want to target and what your audience is made up of. Depending on the nature of your brand or products, your target audience could be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram.

Your planning should also include creating a content marketing plan. If you aren’t creating content that social media users want, it will be difficult to convince them to follow you. Your content plan should outline what type of content you should create across the various social channels and blog.

In summing up this first step, finish off by creating achievable social media goals. For this situation, your goal is to grow an audience for your products and brand. Other goals include increasing brand awareness, improving ROI, creating a loyal fan base and ultimately increase in-person sales.

Having goals will enable you to stay on course throughout the campaign. If you realize you are behind your goals, you can find ways of ramping up efforts and prioritize gaining more followers. To monitor your progress, have metrics that indicate your progress. They include fan count, page and post impressions, link clicks, website analytics and post reach.

Growing Your Facebook Audience

Facebook is undeniably social media giant for online presence. With billions of users, you can leverage this to grow your social audience effectively. Facebook provides plenty of bells and whistles that can help you boost your outreach strategy. However, none of this will matter if you don’t have the right strategy. Some of the insightful strategies that can help you increase your fan base include;

• Post the right content – you are certainly well versed with how Facebook works. Facebook feeds are filled with content from competitor brands, friends, co-workers and other people in their connection. If you want to grow your audience, you should ask people to share your content. For them to do so, you must post relevant and insightful stuff.
• Invest in Facebook ads – when people sign up for Facebook, they submit details that are very insightful. Data collected include education levels, hobbies, interests, demographics and much more. As a marketer, you can leverage this to target a specific audience.
• Improve organic reach – your Facebook reach strategy shouldn’t solely focus on paying for ads. Even as Facebook shrunk organic reach for companies and brands, it is still possible to get organic reach.

Growing Instagram Audience

Boosting of the highest social engagement rate that any other social network, Instagram should be one of the platforms to focus on to grow your audience. Due to this, the competition to capture attention and grow your audience is more fierce that it was before. Nonetheless, with the right strategies, you can grow an engaged audience full of future customers and your brand’s advocates.

• Master the art of using hashtags – hashtags are effective for both Instagram and Twitter. They are perhaps the best way to increase the visibility of your posts. When using hashtags, note that not all can bring along the same effect. Therefore, you should identify the best hashtags to use as well as place them strategically.
• Leverage other peoples audience with takeovers – Instagram takeover is a situation where a brand allows another person, in most cases an influencer, to take over their posting schedule for a day. The goal of this is to channel their followers engage with your account since someone they know is running the account temporarily.
• Spread a word about your account – it is difficult to gain followers when nobody knows about your brand. Begin by taking advantage of Instagram’s environment to professionally showcase your brand. The best way is to use a simple and easily searchable name. Also, don’t cut corners when filling in your Instagram bio. Take advantage of Instagram’s geotagging feature to show your followers where you tour or are located.
• Use social media bots – social media bots can help increase your followers and promote your content and thus automate the bulk of your social media marketing.

Growing Your Twitter Audience

Experts have likened the art of getting Twitter audience to stopping people on a busy road and having them to visit your store. All users are moving quickly, and there are thousands of stores to check out. To win an audience, therefore, you have to approach them strategically.

Create an awesome twitter bio – your Twitter bio is the first stop Twitter users will make when deciding if they should follow you or not. Therefore, you should have an engaging bio to compel users to click that follow button.

Use proven tactics – there is no secret magic to growing Twitter audience. There are specific tactics that provide straight throughway to audience growth. Among the proven tactics for Twitter audience growth include;

• Tweet frequently
• Optimize your Twitter posting time
• Make use of hashtags
• Post more visual contents
• Engage with followers through retweets, replies and tags
• Create an inviting profile
• Draw in followers outside Twitter

General Social Audience Growth Tips

Whereas some social media tactics are specific, others are universal and can be beneficial to any platform. If your strategy involves improving your overall social media presence, consider the following tips.

Create viral content – having your content go viral is perhaps every marketer’s dream. If you can generate compelling content that people will enjoy sharing, growing your audience gets easier. Of course, for people to share your content, ensure that it is useful enough to be shared.

Focus on engagement – the best way to grow your social audience is to increase engagement. The more people you socially engage with, the more likely your social media algorithms rise. To achieve this, you can try some simple tips such as asking the right questions to your audience.

Final Thoughts

Don’t forget that growing your social audience for your products and brand will not happen overnight. The tips outlined above come in handy in growing an audience who are interested in your products or what your brand offers. Having a massive social audience is key if you need to create a buzz around your products.