It’s no secret that large and small businesses from a variety of industries are now finding success through Social Media marketing strategies. Now, when every business out there seems to be fighting for the attention of a limited pool of followers, the question of how to gain and keep followers becomes extremely important.
- The best way to gain and keep followers, first and foremost, is to make sure you are posting relevant, fresh, and interesting content on a regular basis. Loyal followers stick around when you continue to provide them with quality content time after time.
- As always, engage directly with your followers. While it’s important to post lots of content, it is also crucial to take the time to communicate with your followers. Ask questions, answer questions, send direct messages, make use of @ replies on Twitter, and share relevant content that other people post.
- Keep in mind that it’s better to have a narrow focus than a broad one. Have a special area of interest, and stick with it. If you’re all over the place, followers have a hard time trying to figure out what you are promoting. When you have a focus, not only do you help your followers understand what you are trying to communicate, you also become a go-to source of information on that topic.
- Promote yourself on multiple social networks. Each network is a little bit different and attracts different types of people. It’s a good idea to have a continuing presence on many networks – then connect the dots. If you are promoting a product on a text-based site like twitter or facebook, for example, you can include a link to high-quality pictures of that product on a picture-based site like pinterest or flickr.
- Lastly, don’t expect immediate results. Building a community of loyal followers takes time. Don’t buy into widely used spamming techniques that promise quick and significant increases to your website traffic. An example of this is following huge numbers of users who may or may not be the target demographic that you are trying to reach and then posting lots of links. A technique like this will only be successful in the short term. Avoid spamming just for the sake of increasing followers, and instead focus on genuine communication with followers who would actually be interested in what you have to offer. This is harder to do and requires much more times, patience, and perseverance, but in the end, the results will be worth it!
Do you have any other tips you’d like to share? Comment below, or tweet us @PawsPR ! We look forward to hearing from you!