The Secret to Growing Your Brand on Social Media

Social media can be a pervasive and positive force. It’s also an ideal way to build brand awareness and equity with your current audience. The sheer number of users on each platform also makes it ideal for growing your audience. You can try to “beat the algorithm” to grow on social media or you can use a tried-and-true process of consistency. Consistency isn’t easy but we’ll show you how it can grow your brand on social media.

Know your brand’s audience.

You will need to do some research to understand your target audience and the social media channels they use. People use each platform for a different purpose and expect to find different content on each one.

Read “Understanding Your Brand’s Target Market” for more insight into how to do this.

From Instagram feed posts to Stories and Reels, to Highlights, there are four channels to manage on one platform. Then add in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok with each of their mediums and quirks, you’ve got a lot to manage.

Analyzing your audience’s activity and engagement times on each platform is a great place to start when deciding how to strategically post your content at the optimal time. By posting at a high usage time, you’ll increase the likelihood of your audience seeing it.

The most important element of knowing your audience is to know what they expect and what they want from your brand. Answering the question, “So what?” with everything you post is vital to creating good content instead of just adding to the noise.

Optimize your profiles on each social media platform.

This is one of the best ways to show the professionalism of your brand from an initial view. When a user goes to your profile they are analyzing it subconsciously (and consciously) to determine if the quality is high enough to permit you on their feed. Use this simple checklist to optimize your profiles:

·      Make sure your profile image is high quality, legible, and attractive.

·      Use the same profile image across all platforms.

·      Use the same handles across each platform.

·      Add a relevant brand hashtag to your bio.

·      Show the value-add of your brand in your bio.

·      Include a call-to-action or link in your bio.

Have a social media strategy and a content calendar.

Strategy and consistency are the names of the game when growing your social media. When it comes to audiences discovering new accounts, the algorithm is more likely to show similar types of posts that users have previously liked. Creating a consistent feel of your posts both within your brand and within the broader industry is essential to build momentum and increase engagement rates.

Organizing your content by audience type, post type, and service/product type will help keep your content fresh. Then you can use a content calendar to help you plan your posts to create consistency instead of posting on a whim when you have a moment to spare.

By mapping your content on a calendar, managing all the different platforms will feel less overwhelming and it will provide a visual record of how often you’re posting and to which audience you’re directing each post.

Actively engage with your audience in the native platform.

There are countless tools available for managing your social platforms. Meta provides Meta Business for managing Facebook and Instagram; Buffer, Later, Sprout Social and many others provide multi-platform management tools.

However, your social media accounts should aim for two-way communication, not merely throwing content out and hoping your audience hears you. Building a loyal following and growing your brand equity requires engaging with your audience by responding to comments, answering questions, liking and commenting on photos your brand or product is tagged in, and sparking new conversations with like-minded brands.

Exchanging messages and comments and tags with individual accounts and relevant industry brands can help boost your content because most algorithms will serve a user additional content when it relates to what they already interact with.

Follow other industry brands and profiles.

Follow relevant brands in your industry that share a similar audience as yours — excluding competitors, of course. Then engage with these brands by sharing their posts, liking, and commenting on their content. Doing this often enough can increase your brand visibility and possibly your follower count. Pro tip: don’t do this if you can’t do it genuinely. There is nothing worse than the smell of desperation from an account and it’s not an association you want with yours. 

Growing your platform and expanding your audience using social media can feel daunting as if everyone else knows the secret but you. No more! Apply a bit of strategy and authenticity to a consistent content calendar and you’ll be set for increasing your brand engagement and audience.