Neworld, Great relationships build great brands

First things first, increasing social media followers is not a marketing objective for your brand. There are however a number of objectives which can be achieved more efficiently with a larger number of followers. For example, if you want to improve brand awareness or generate leads organically on Facebook or Instagram then a larger following will help you achieve these goals. Unfortunately, Facebook’s algorithm limits the reach of our organic content with only about 5% of our followers actually seeing our posts. Therefore, while number of followers is not necessarily a measure of success for your brand on social media, 5% of 10,000 is a lot better than 5% of 100…

Another reason brands might want to increase their following on social media is to improve credibility. We know that 52% of consumers in Ireland believe that they can find more information about a brand on their social media accounts than on their website. It’s therefore important to send a positive message of credibility on your account.

So how do we grow our social media following organically?

There’s 2 key things to remember here:

1. Engagement starts on your side
2. Quality is more important than quantity

Engagement starts on your side

Unless you’re David Attenborough on Instagram, posting one video is not going to earn you 1 million followers in a couple of hours. The steps to actively finding new followers start with you and here’s some hacks to help.

• Be active on your competitors’ accounts. Like and comment on their content so that your brand becomes visible to their followers.
• In particular, try and identify the followers who are especially active on these competitors’ accounts, if they like their brand then there’s a good chance they’ll be interested in your’s too. When you’ve identified them, follow them or engage with their content so that they can discover your brand.
• Explore #’s that are relevant to your brand in order to find other accounts that are using these #’s. If these people are using #’s related to your brand then they’re likely to be interested in your account.
• Find recent posts that have used your relevant #’s in the last couple of minutes and engage with them straight away. The creator is likely to still be online and using their phone which means there’s a better chance they will check out your brand when it pops up in their notifications.

Remember that all your activity and engagement at this stage should be non-commercial. Join a conversation, share some information or respond positively to other people or brands’ content. Don’t try to explicitly sell anything as you try to gather new followers as social media users will find this intrusive and inauthentic.

Follower quality over quantity

Everyone has heard the proposition that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. While this might not be true in every industry, it does highlight the importance of finding the right followers for your brand. When you are actively trying to build your social media following, you want to identify people who are genuinely interested in your brand and what it can offer them. These are the people who will become your paying customers.

We would recommend avoiding “get rich quick” strategies such as giveaways where the prize is something that appeals to all audiences. You might experience a huge surge in followers but these people will probably never be your customers and will most likely unfollow your page once the giveaway has ended. Instead, think about what objectives your following will help you achieve, focus on quality over quantity and follow the steps above to start actively finding valuable followers for your brand.

The cost of organic social media marketing

The steps to grow social media following organically require a consistent investment of time and effort from your marketing or social media team. Sporadic engagement will not send the right message to your followers. Since organic activity does not require ad spend in the way we discussed last week, the cost of organic social media marketing lies in the development and maintenance of a strategic and on-brand organic online presence. Before you do this, you also need to make sure that your brand identity is fully developed and understood by all members of your company. If you think there’s potential to explore your identity further before growing your social presence, get in touch with us at Neworld for a chat.

Sources: Mintel. (2020). Social Networking: Inc Impact of Covid-19. Ireland- May 2020