Social media as an advertising strategy is an organic way to grow your business and expose it to new potential consumers at low to no cost. Once you have a solid following on your social media channels, it can do wonders for promoting a product or service because social media users’ ability to share and propagate the spread of content is limitless. However, if you are starting fresh, or if you just simply are not seeing your number of “likes” and “follows” go up on your social media channels, you may be scratching your head as to how to get more social media followers for your business.

The first thing you need to keep in mind when it comes to getting more social media followers for your business is that you cannot just sit back and let it happen. You have to play both an active and reactive role when it comes to social media engagement. Otherwise, your numbers will likely sit stagnant.

Here are a few strategies that you can employ to get more social media followers for your business.

• Follow other individuals and organizations. This is a great place to start. Spend a significant amount of time following accounts of people, businesses or community groups in your area with the hope that they will in turn follow you back.
• Share your company page on your personal page. Use your family and friend resources and ask them for help in following and sharing your social pages.
• Promote your social channels on all marketing assets. Whether it is on your blog, your emails, or your contact page—always give people a chance to link directly to your social accounts.
• Host contests and giveaways. People like free stuff—period. We’ve seen tremendous spikes in followers for our clients from our clients simply asking users to “like and share” a post in order to win a gift basket, tickets to a sporting event, or even a free consultation or service.
• Share content from influential entities. Find interesting and engaging content from influential pages in your industry and share them on your own accounts. Tag, mention them and comment on their blogs. This could help them recognize you and promote you in return.
• Post original content. Just as much as sharing other users’ content can help you garner more followers, so can posting original content that is relevant to your industry and target customer base. You want to paint yourself as an expert in your industry, and social media is an effective platform on which you can do so.
• Use hashtags. Hashtags are used on social media to group similar content. They are searchable, so the content that you associate with a certain hashtag could end up in front of eyes that would not have known where to find it otherwise.
• Paid advertising. Though you should start out growing your social media following organically, it can help to push your content to the next level using promoted or sponsored posts. You can spend as much or as little on it as is fitting for your budget.
• Be responsive. Social media users want to know there is a human being on the other side of your company page. Like and respond to comments, answer questions and reply to messages that your clientele sends you via your social accounts.
• Be consistent. People are less inclined to want to follow a social media page that they see has not posted in six months or so. This indicates an inactive social media presence and a lack of effort on the company’s part. Come up with a regular posting schedule and stick to it to increase your company’s social media credibility.

Social media can be an effective marketing medium, but it only works if you have the followers necessary to make your presence there known. Once you do get more social media followers for your business, you should find it easy to communicate your brand’s messages to your prospective client base in a low-effort and low-cost manner.

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