How To Grow Your Social Media Following Organically
Manage all your social media accounts in one place.
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Introduction
Welcome to Loomly!
With the number of followers as a general marker of how popular your accounts are, consistently working on growing your audience is a strategic endeavor for your brand.
Indeed, a larger following means more brand recognition, customer loyalty and business opportunities.
In this video, you will learn how to organically and sustainably grow your social media audience, by producing valuable content, optimizing your posts, using hashtags to find an audience with similar interests and tagging other individuals & organizations to include them in relevant conversations.
1. Create Valuable Content
Creating content to which your audience will relate and with which they will engage is the number one priority to growing your following.
As social media is getting always more visual, images and interactive content are key to stand out.
For example, studies show that tweets with images receive 89% more likes than tweets without images.
Similarly, photos on Facebook receive 53% more likes and attract 104% more comments than text-only posts.
Loomly’s library allows you to store media and use them in your posts & ads.
You can create post templates and reuse them whenever you need them.
This is quite handy when you need a boilerplate for recurring posts that you want to publish over and over again with slight variations.
You can also create notes to save text and links in your library.
This is ideal when you come across a website you find useful or when someone in your team mentions an idea during a meeting.
Last but not least, you can add labels, subjects & descriptions to all your library items, making it easier to organise your assets.
When you add a description to a note and create a post from that note, the description is automatically used as the copy of the post (which you can then edit if necessary).
If you create a post from multiple notes: descriptions will be appended to each other to form the copy of the post.
Loomly’s post optimization tips also guide you through the creation process of your post, in the form of suggestions and best practices based on length of post, media, time of post, and format.
2. Use Hashtags To Increase Your Social Media Exposure
Hashtags help expose more people to your social media accounts because people who are searching for a specific hashtag might see your post.
Using hashtags relevant and related to your brand allows you to attract other like-minded people to your posts and grow your following.
If your account is all about basketball and you want to grow your audience, using basketball-related hashtags on your posts will expose you to potentially-new followers who are interested in the content that you are publishing.
Loomly can help you include hashtags in your posts in two different ways.
The first is via the Hashtag Autosuggest feature: in Post Builder, whenever you type in the “#” symbol in the copy field, the full history of hashtags previously used in your calendar will pop up: Hashtag Autosuggest works both in the Generic Content & Fine-Tuning panels, and will display previously-used hashtags respectively from each panel.
The second is through the Hashtag Collection feature, which allows you to pre-save your favorite hashtags together and have them easily inserted as an ensemble in your posts.
Once you have created a Hashtag collection, you can insert it in your post by typing the “#” symbol, followed by the name of the hashtag collection that you have created. It will automatically populate the copy of the post with all the hashtags from the corresponding collection.
Back to our previous example, if your account is all about basketball, you can create one collection of hashtags featuring famous basketball players and another around the playoffs of the current year.
Using hashtags in a consistent fashion will help establish your brand’s presence and grow your following organically, attracting users who relate to the content you are posting.
You can also follow trending and relevant hashtags to get content inspiration and comment on other accounts that are in your niche, to be able to gain visibility from that brand’s following as well.
3. Engage & Interact With Your Community
Engaging and interacting with your audience is what makes social media “social”.
When creating new posts, you can @mention other accounts to feature them or catch their attention. For instance, cross promotion and collaboration with other brands is a great way to gain new followers.
When creating a post in Loomly, you can @mention another account by typing the “@” symbol in the copy field of Post Builder followed by the name of that account.
You will see that brand’s name menu that drops down and you will be able to select the corresponding account.
Once your post goes live, that brand will be notified that they were mentioned in your post and will be able to comment upon it, creating a dialogue and sparking engagement from their own followers.
In order to grow your audience, it’s important to also maintain a genuine connection with your existing followers.
Loomly Interactions allow you to reply to comments, mentions and messages left on your account and develop an ongoing conversation with your audience.
Making sure that you consistently respond to the comments of your audience is key to make them feel heard and build trust in your brand.
Loomly shows you unread comments & messages highlighted in grey, so you always know which Interactions need a response from you.
Never missing a comment or message will also help you maintain an excellent response rate to keep in touch with your audience.
4. Be Consistent
One mistake you really want to avoid posting too sporadically.
Potential followers want to see that your account is active and relevant before they decide to follow you.
The same goes with your existing audience, who may be tempted to unfollow you if you do not demonstrate that you are still there.
The best way to attract and retain followers is through consistent publishing.
Studies show that posting to Facebook once a day is optimal, with a maximum of two posts per day.
It is recommended to post on Twitter anywhere between 3-30 times a day, as tweets have a short shelf life and tend to be buried quite fast in users’ feeds.
On Instagram, research recommends to post at least once per day but no more than 3 times.
As far as Pinterest is concerned, the minimum recommended pinning frequency is 3 times a day. Posting more than 30 pins per day, though, does not statistically results in any major benefits for brands.
Finally, on LinkedIn, it is recommended to post at least twice a week, preferably in the morning, as this is geared towards general business hours.
Loomly helps you plan, create and schedule posts in advance, which empowers you publish posts in a consistent, relevant and engaging manner, entertaining your current audience while attracting new followers.
Wrap Up
By creating valuable and relatable content, using hashtags to find like minded users, interacting and engaging with them, and consistently creating content to establish yourself as a reliable brand, you will be able to organically grow your following.
Showing commitment to your social media strategy day-in, day-out is the most efficient way to grow your audience in an organic and sustainable fashion.Go for it: your new followers are waiting for you.
And that’s it! Thanks for watching this video.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact our team, either through our chat or over email at contact@loomly.com.
