We all know how important audience is on social media. In fact, social media has become one of the best ways for brands to directly connect with their customers and community. It’s a no-brainer that increasing your following on social media helps grow your customer base, brand recognition, and, well, profits.
Looking to grow your audience along with the rest of us? Increase reach, boost engagement, and build your community on social media using these basic organic strategies that won’t cost a cent.
Engagement tactics
43% of marketers have indicated their primary goal for social media is to improve community engagement. Engaging with your audience by interacting with your followers, customers and similar accounts can increase chances of your account being seen, while strong engagement can also help boost your position in the algorithm and encourage platforms to serve your content to a broader audience. Try out these community engagement tips to help bolster growth:
- Follow relevant accounts, customers, key stakeholders and employees (if appropriate) on social media.
- Spend time interacting with your audience by liking and commenting on their posts as well as replying to stories, tweets and DMs. Tip: try engaging with influencers in your niche.
- Share posts from your audience with a reply. This can look like a quote tweet, a LinkedIn re-post, or sharing a post to your Instagram story.
- Invite your audience to engage using interactive tools like polls (available on Instagram stories, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter) or use other interactive widgets. You can even ask your followers questions directly through organic engagement posts.
- Community manage customer service inquiries (for business accounts). This includes promptly answering questions, managing negative comments and directing customer service requests.
Social media optimization tactics
Similar to SEO strategy, optimize your social media accounts for discoverability. Boost your account’s search-ability by ensuring your social media bios are prepped and relevant keywords are frequently quoted throughout your content. This increases your chances of appearing in a social media search on platforms when users are seeking relevant information, helping the right viewers find your content and reach more potential followers (and potential leads).
- Secure your bio. Ensure your account’s bios, bio links and any other text on your social accounts are up to date and optimized with keywords.
- Make your accounts easy to find. On your website, clearly display links your social media accounts. On your social media accounts, ensure it’s easy to find your profiles on other platforms and include link to your website. This small step makes it so your audience can easily find you on other platforms you have a presence on.
- Leverage the power of keywords. Strategically use relevant keywords in your social media captions to amp up the discoverability of your posts and connect content to overarching topics.
- Use #hashtags. Incorporate related hashtags into your social media copy to reinforce reach and directly connect your posts to the right audiences and conversations.
- Tag away! Be sure to tag any relevant people, businesses or organizations in your posts and stories to increase chances of your post reaching their audience as well (this can work especially well on LinkedIn and Twitter 😉).
- Categorize content. Where available, indicate the type of content your account is producing to help the algorithm reach the right viewers with your posts. For example, utilize the “tag” feature on Instagram when posting a reel to help Instagram learn more about the subject of your video and ensure your content reach the right demographic.
Strategic posting tactics
Instagram, TikTok and most other social media platforms tend to favour active accounts that engage with the platform regularly, and even with shifting algorithms, it’s common sense that posting consistently increases the chances of your brand being seen. That’s why it’s important to establish a consistent posting schedule, optimized for each social media channel.
- Create a monthly organic calendar. Develop and produce a monthly content calendar in advance including captions, design elements, assets and links.
- Schedule your posts in advance. Use a scheduling tool like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to develop a balanced, organized monthly plan and maintain a consistent posting cadence. Additionally, consider the time of day you post as it can have an impact on engagement. According to Sprout, the best times to post on social media are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 9 or 10am. Tip: set reminders for yourself to post any manual content like Instagram stories or LinkedIn pages.
- Diversify your content. Ensure that you’re producing and posting various types of different content using in-app editing features when possible. Include a mix of static posts, carousels, reels or video, stories, text-only posts, etc.
- Optimize content by platform. To pack the biggest punch, consider how the organic content. For example, a square, static post can also be resized to a 9:16 story, or an Instagram reel might also work well on your brand’s TikTok.
Now that you’re finally armed with the latest tools and strategies to organically grow your social media audience, it’s time to focus on implementation—happy growing!
Signal Harbour 
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