Everyone wants to grow their social media followers these days. It’s a great way to sell products and services. The key is finding ways to attract your ideal audience without spending a fortune. Below, we’ve chosen 11 social media marketing hacks guaranteed to increase your followers.
You can increase your brand awareness and reach your target audience with these hacks. If you’re ready to get some real tips that work, just read on!
Hack #1: Set Up Your Social Media Accounts
This is a basic step that every entrepreneur should take right at the beginning. Choose the right social media networks, then optimize them specifically for your target audience. That way, you’ll begin to attract the right followers…people who will engage with your brand.
Remember that in the world of social media, each network attracts a particular type of consumer. Once you understand this, you can more easily target those consumers with a specific message that will appeal to them personally.
Below are the top 4 social media platforms along with their primary users:
- YouTube: This is a great platform that you can use in multiple ways. Here’s the breakdown of demographics by age:
- 90% of 18–24-year-olds use the platform.
- 93% of 25–30-year-olds use it.
- 87% of 30–49-year-olds use it.
Note that YouTube users are primarily millennials who use YouTube’s recommendation algorithm to decide what to watch. Over half of its users are men. Mobile devices are the preferred medium.
- Facebook: These users are mostly adults in the medium to high-income bracket. Over fifty percent are women. The majority browse on their computer.
- Instagram: This platform attracts a younger audience with higher education. Females are more prevalent on the network than males. Like Twitter, they have a large international audience.
- Twitter: Twitter has a big international use-base of adults in higher income brackets. There’s a fairly even split of males and females.
Hack #2: Set up a professional-looking page with appropriate photos
One of the most important social media marketing hacks. Optimizing your Social Media profiles is important to get right. If you feel you need it, then get professional help to set this up. The most obvious optimizations are the images you use. Make sure your header and profile images are the right dimensions for the specific site network.
Header Image Sizes
Below are the header image dimensions for the Big 3 social platforms:
- Facebook Cover Dimensions: 820px by 312px
- Twitter Header Dimensions: 1500px by 500px
- YouTube Channel Art Dimensions: 2560px by 1440px
As you design your header image, make sure it sends the right message to potential followers. It might be an image of your team. Users need to see the face of your business. Sometimes a high-quality collage of your products/services is a good way to demonstrate who you are and what you’re all about. Choose an image that will be instantly recognizable across all social media networks.
Hack #3: Share the content your Users want to see
Stay in touch with what your users are involved in, including what they watch on TV, what they wear, where they go, what they eat, etc. When you know your audience that well, then it won’t difficult to bring the content to them that they’re interested in. Users will stay most consistently involved if you’re appealing to their needs, wants, and desires.
Hack #4: Un-tag Yourself from Inappropriate Content
To give users get the best impression of your business, be careful about the content that you’re tagged in. If the content is irrelevant to your users, they’ll be less interested in following you. If it’s too political, has adult content that could be inappropriate, or includes any racism, then you risk turning off your users and turning them away. Offensive content makes you look like an amateur, but it also gives people a bad impression of who you are. You risk losing followers and damaging your brand.
Hack #5: Make Your Content Specific to Each Network
It can be tempting to post the same things across all networks just to save time etc. But look at the demographics for each platform. The audiences expect to see different content on Instagram than they would see on Facebook. Remember that audiences now are more sophisticated about social media.
Let’s take a look at each platform:
- Instagram users appreciate high-quality photos, image quotes, and heartfelt stories.
- YouTube is an all-video platform where you can find music, podcasts, and the best cat videos around. People love YouTube so take advantage of that by creating amazing videos to post there.
- Facebook users tend to favor personal messages back and forth with friends. They also like blog post links to interesting stories. Games, riddles and short videos do well there.
- Twitter is well-known for its short personal updates from users. Links to good blogs, news updates, and GIFs also do well.
Hack #6: Share popular stories, events, news, and videos
Stay on top of what’s happening each day with relevant stories, links, news items, and videos. When stories unfold across the globe, consumers will start looking for content. Make sure they can find that on your platform.
For instance, maybe a favorite actor died, or a popular singer was admitted to a drug treatment program. Maybe there’s a new movie coming out soon or a TV show that everyone enjoys is coming back. Since this can be a time-consuming job, it’s often best to hire someone to handle it. They don’t necessarily need to be a social media guru with a high price tag. The job of surfing the news each day and pulling out the important stories is not that difficult.
Hack #7: Optimize your content with your high-ranking keywords
Start by optimizing your social media profiles. Then make sure all content is fully optimized including your website. This is an important first step towards more followers and it will ensure that you have high click-through rates. The bottom line for many entrepreneurs is making a sale and that’s what good SEO practices can do for you. Work on the content you share. Make sure it fully addresses the needs of your consumers. What types of things are relevant to your followers? What are their primary pain points or needs?
Hack #8: Good analytics
You need to find out what content is doing the best. This is something you should be doing regularly. Try some plug-ins for WordPress such as MonsterInsights. This is a Google Analytics plugin that gives you an actionable report of your top-performing posts. It offers lots of great information about your categories, tags, and more. Plus, you can view all this right from your WordPress dashboard. If you have a Squarespace or Weebly site, you’ll find similar tools available on these platforms. If you aren’t sure how to properly set up Google Analytics on your WordPress site, you can find a tutorial online about this or just hire a freelancer to handle everything for you.
Hack #9: Repurpose Popular Content
Once you get busy, you’ll realize that you simply don’t have time for everything you’d like to do. Repurposing old content that has done well in the past is a great way to keep your content refreshed. You’ll save a ton of time and you’ll find that this is a cheaper option in the long run because your writer won’t spend as long on rewrites. You can still offer your readers high-value content which is the key to getting more followers.
Below are some suggestions for repurposing your content:
- Turn written content into podcast episodes.
- Transform popular blog posts into hands-on guides with actionable steps.
- Create case studies that highlight the advantages of your products/services.
- Simplify long or complex content by turning it into infographics. These offer smaller, bite-size information readers can easily understand.
- Write an ebook and offer it for free on your site. This will help you get a good email list. You can compile information from your site or old blog posts.
- Use top-performing blog posts to create a free course teaching your audience a valuable skill.
- Take excerpts from old blog posts and turn them into a series of interesting emails.
Hack #10: Share Visual Content
Videos outperform all other types of content, so why not give people what they want? You’ll need a good scriptwriter and a company that makes videos. Be sure to include this in your marketing budget. Visual content is rapidly gaining popularity. People are searching for funny, interesting, unique, and unusual videos to share with their friends. Don’t forget that visual content can include other formats besides videos:
- Animated GIFs
- Humorous Memes
- High-quality images
- Instructional videos
- Emojis used to convey emotions
- Graphs consolidating information
Hack #11: Discounts & Promotions
Last but not least of the Social Media Marketing Hacks. There’s a holiday about every six weeks in America so take advantage of those to offer specials, discounts, 2 for 1 deals, etc. Give people a good reason to visit your site and make a purchase. And make it fun. Use a little humor with your promotional ads. Make them interesting and relevant to the holiday. Imagine it’s President’s Day. You could make fun of a past president in your ad. It’s easy to use relevant language for the holiday. Suppose it’s the 4th of July. Your ads could include “Skyrocketing Savings” in the content or images.
Ready to try these Social Media Marketing Hacks?
If you work it right, you can make your business a success. All the tools are online now, but many just don’t know how to use them. Try hiring freelancers from a few of the popular freelance sites to help you. If you don’t know how to find the right keywords, then hire somebody to do this for you. The same goes for writing blogs, emails, or ads. Freelancers are a great idea because they’re not full-time employees that will expect vacations, insurance, or bonuses each year. They’ll work hard and do a good job because that’s how they earn a living. Try these Social Media Marketing hacks by yourself and let us know (or not) how your business goes after.
Not ready to try everything by yourself? Contact an expert for professional advice.
