How to Grow Your Brand’s Social Media Influence
Social media is one of the top ways to reach consumers, offering the biggest reach for each dollar spent. While paid social media ads remain a great way to engage today’s consumers, however, ads can easily be ignored, especially if they’re surrounded by interesting updates from friends and colleagues.
For several years, businesses have turned to social media influencers to broaden their reach. Whether they’re active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or another platform, these influencers have numerous active followers who consistently follow and share the information they post. But you don’t have to partner with an influencer to reach a wider audience. Here are a few tips to help you increase your own social media influence.
Post Interesting Content
Before you can attract fully-engaged followers, you must first give them something interesting to follow. Work hard to generate interesting content like blog posts and videos and share them freely across your platforms. Make sure it’s content that your target demographic would be interested in, including how-to tips and advice. Sharing promotional information about your brand won’t be effective unless you find a way to clearly demonstrate how your product or service is changing lives or adding value to businesses.
Don’t limit your content to what you can create yourself. Instead sign up for services that make it easier to find information relevant to your followers so that you can share it. By incorporating content curation into your strategy, you’ll be able to regularly share interesting content with little effort. You’ll also be able to build relationships with those whose content you share, especially if the piece was written by or about someone in your industry.
Partner Up
You can extend your reach by finding a way to work others into the pieces you post. When you tag someone, that person is likely to share the post, which will then put your name in front of all of that person’s followers. Make an arrangement with others in your industry to guest blog, swapping posts on different days to get more exposure. You’ll both have interesting content from a new voice and you’ll also be able to share the post across your platforms, with your host sharing the information, as well.
Services like Help a Reporter can help you gain exposure you wouldn’t have otherwise had. Journalists post requests for interviews and quotes and qualified experts pitch their own experience. If chosen, you could be featured in a prominent publication. This leads to a great opportunity to build your influence, since you’ll be able to share the link on social media, tagging the publication. The author, publication, and others mentioned in the piece may post about it, as well.
Monitor Results
As early in the process as possible, set up services to help you track your efforts. In doing so, you’ll be able to determine the type of content that engages followers and boosts your reach. A tool like Cyfe lets you monitor your social presence using simple widgets. You can also easily see which of your posts got the most traction across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube. Perhaps the most valuable tool is the built-in ability to monitor your Klout score, which helps determine your level of influence on social platforms.
On social media, interaction is key to success as an influencer. Tools like Mention let you set up notifications for any mention of your brand, your industry, the products you sell, your competitors, and more. If you’re notified right away of relevant online posts, you can reply or share the information more quickly than your competitors might, giving you an edge in your market. You can also use Mention to identify influencers and interact with them, possibly leading to them eventually sharing your content and giving you valuable exposure.
When your social media influence rises, you can launch a post and reach a larger group of people. You may also find other brands want to partner with you to help expand their reach. With so many tools available to help, you can monitor your results and tweak your content marketing campaigns to reach more people and land more long-term customers.
Posted in Social Networking.
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