If you ask some random person from the business world the ways to grow your business, without question they’ll tell you to ‘‘use social media’’. Whether you’re a customer or a seller the advantages are countless, and as such it is important to learn how to grow social media followers for your business.
You can reach way more customers which is only one of the perks of a growing business with social media. As this process changes constantly and new trends and inclinations appear daily, the question of how to grow social media accounts and thus your business is the first step to getting into it. Today, we’ll talk you through concepts such as social media and business growth while pointing out the parts you need to pay attention to. And we check social media marketing strategies for 2022!
Various Types of Social Media Platforms
From the start of the pandemic, social media and to what extent it affects our lives changed drastically and fast. During the months we had to stay home, our whole work schedules, education hours and methods, and what we do to socialize in our leisure time were replaced with zoom meetings, remote work hours, and discovering fun and educational live streams.
So as business owners, you now have a vast amount of advantage to reach your customers and grow your business in the meantime. The first step to doing it right passes from knowing which platforms to use and how to use them.
– How to Choose the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business?
As you’re reading this manual on ways to grow business with social media, you’re probably reading it at your office or home or ‘’home office’’ as the whole world now loves remote work. And perhaps you catch up with your family on group chats via Whatsapp, celebrate birthdays through zoom meetings, and use Instagram to see what your colleagues are doing. All the apps I mentioned are your social media addresses. Just like that, your customers, the present and the potential ones, have social media platforms they use regularly, which makes it easy to reach them once you know the address.
What is your target market age group and where do they hang out? Learning that gives you a roadmap on where to start for who you should make your marketing strategies.
– Instagram and TikTok: The rise of short videos
First launched in 2010, Instagram has come a long way from a photo-sharing app. In 2013, the company introduced a new feature that enabled its users to share videos as well as photos. Lastly in 2020, Instagram added another video feature called Instagram Reels, following the wave of short video popularity after TikTok. The platform passed 1 billion monthly users in 2018 and in 2021; this number reached 2 billion with the start of the pandemic. According to reports, 68% of Instagram users are female while 90% of the total number is under 30 years old.
As for TikTok, the platform is used and loved by almost every age group, drawing businesses into the platform as well. Founded in 2016, TikTok provides its users with both fast and fun content to watch and create. By buying Musical.ly in 2018 and rebranding it as TikTok, the company reached new demographics in a really short time. Now with 1 billion monthly users, it’s a platform you can reach many young audiences for social media and business growth.
Twitter is like an open journal people share their thoughts and see other people as well. It operates as a communication app for a wide range of subjects from politics to fashion, sports to celebrities, and TV shows. Mostly used for +18 years old, Twitter is a strong platform for your business if you want to interact via facts and serious matters. However, you can also follow a more familiar vibe and tweet with a sense of humor as a part of your social media marketing strategy.
– Twitch
Founded in 2011, Twitch is a video live streaming service. It provides different types of content such as gaming streaming to music live streaming. With many popular content creators on gaming and e-sport, it’s a useful platform for business owners and brands in these fields.
Offering an endless connection to friends, family, and basically the whole world, Facebook provides easy access to potential customers for both freelancers and companies and brands. With its 1.9 billion daily users, it offers business owners a simple and effective way to start their online community and reach new demographics from there.
– YouTube
YouTube is one of the social media platforms that changed drastically over the years. Not in the way it operates but in terms of the reasons it’s used for. The platform creates many different lines of work including being a ‘‘YouTuber’’. It’s also a good way to understand the question of how to grow your social media accounts as many who started out with 5 subscribers now can have up to 400,000 followers using the algorithms. Changing your content in the direction of demand and keeping your original approach at the same time work wonders on this platform.
Ways to Grow Your Business Using Social Media
Business is now more than shaking hands in a room full of people with suits on. It goes beyond deals on papers and now becomes a more mutual interaction you create with your customers. That’s why the terms social media and business growth go hand in hand. Let’s look at why you need to use social media for your business and how you can start reaching more people than you can ever imagine!
– What does the math say about it?
The part almost every business owner dreads is the time you look at the numbers and they don’t look as you want them to be. Now, numbers can be frustrating at times but one thing we know about them that is 100% true is that they don’t lie. And if you follow them and read them right, they get you exactly where you want to go.
To grow a business with social media, you need to remember how to work with it. If your interaction rates are dropping, it’s time to increase them fast because connecting with customers is the biggest advantage social media provides to business owners. Looking out for your KPIs also helps. That way, you can track your customer satisfaction, revenue growth, profit margin, client retention rate, and revenue per client.
– Setting an alarm clock for social media interactions and why it matters
No matter which social media platform you’re using, one thing in common is persistence. Posting regularly and interacting with your followers creates a bond and idea that you’re there with your service and products for them. This increases the times they check your account and interaction rates.
Remember to determine when your target market uses social media the most. This way, the chance to communicate with them and provide real-time answers grows.
– Finding a pattern that works for you
Since social media platforms tend to enhance every single day and create and add different features, it’s okay if you try and fail to grow your follower numbers the first time. The important part is to keep trying new ways. You can always look at the top-tier companies in your line of business and go over their strategies as well.
For example, if the time you post doesn’t bring a lot of interaction, then tune in another time. The themes you’re going to have on your social media accounts and how you get them across also matter. For young people, you can try a more humorous way of interacting and refer to trending people or subjects. That’ll catch their attention and they’ll start to follow you because more content they want will keep coming.
For older generations, content with more information makes a good impression and gains confidence. For example, how nature-friendly your product or service can increase the participation of parents and conscious customers.
To keep all these details and more read up on our writing about Competitor Analysis on Social Media in 15 Steps and discover how Socialays can help your business!
– Using new media to connect more
Times when people only read newspapers, watched television, and listened to radio seems so long ago yet YouTube, a platform of only 17 years of existence has now more than 112 million daily users. So, what changed? The answer is on the word ‘‘users’’. With the old way of reaching people giving its place to streaming services, photo-sharing platforms, and simple tweets, user participation increased significantly. In new media, people who read and watch the contents are now able to make instant comments about it and share it with their circle of friends. Moreover, they can add their take on the issue and contribute to the content themselves. All this process affects how involved users get in what you share. That’s why the answer to how to grow social media accounts is hidden in how well you connect with your followers and potential customers.
Let them join the conversation. Use your social media account to stir curiosity over your new product or service. Make little polls and partner up with influencers your target age group follows. This increases the feeling of familiarity with your brand and company and makes them trust you more.
– Before paid social media, focus on real people
You may think that coming up with a customized social media plan is a waste of time and want to jump on the advertising and interact immediately. You may think paid social media is a start nonetheless.
Well, we do appreciate your enthusiasm, however, without a proper social media study, such as competitor analysis, you may focus on the wrong parts of your business and customers. Instead, read your followers well and let the algorithms do the rest. When you reach real customers through social media, you can start to create your customer loyalty as well.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
These 3 words are not for the marines who have to remind themselves to think out of the box when they face a hard situation. Not anymore. These days, using social media can be confusing at times, yet the good news is it also has rules. The way to succeed in the social media jungle that constantly grows and expands is to improvise when necessary, adapt to the sudden changes and overcome the present and future problems using your experiences.
Today, social media platforms and new media as a whole play a key part in affecting people’s thoughts, actions, and tendencies. This is one of the reasons why both official and nonofficial corporations pay utmost attention to being involved in social media.
Reaching Your Goals with Socialays’ Partnership
An AI-based social media assistant, Socialays keeps track of your social media accounts and gives real-time notifications. With many distinct features and a fully optimized interface, you can plan on future marketing strategies using the data from Socialays and enjoy business growth while Socialays weed out negative comments, spam, and ads automatically. Join the world of Socialays today and experience the advantages of your own AI-based social media assistant.
Creating Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2022
A new year is full of opportunities to reach new horizons in your business. That includes making the needed adjustments in your social media marketing strategies. We’ve gathered things to pay attention to during this process and how you can pinpoint any possible problems BEFORE they happen! But first, let’s take a look at the basic glossary.
What is social media marketing?
Any interaction and content sharing you make on your accounts as a business owner is social media marketing. It’s a term that’s growing every day mentioned more in studies concerning the link between social media and business growth. Here are the steps to upgrade your social media marketing for 2022!
1. Recap the past years
They say ‘’Experience is the best teacher.’’ for a reason. Looking back at the past year, you can observe where things went smooth and where things got complicated. That way, you can analyze your social media performance and create new strategies. So, what aspects should you pay attention to?
– Customer experience
Customers are like open books, if they like your product or service, they will let you know. And if they don’t like it or have some questions about it on their minds, be sure that you’ll see it too. To improve your customer experience, use the power of personalization. After all, people use social media because it makes them feel special. When you make sure each follower is drawn to your post and join the conversation, sharing personal thoughts, you’re one step closer to gaining one more customer.
– Brand awareness
Do your customers know you? Creating brand awareness on social media helps you introduce yourself to your potential customers. The more you share under a certain theme, the better they can know your brand/ service. After that, when they’re shopping or just looking at things online, they instinctively choose your brand since it feels more trustworthy.
– Expanding target audience
Starting a new year always comes intending to attract new demographics into your business. To do that, you can look at which people you couldn’t draw last year and the reason for it. This provides a solid starting point to create a strategy for expanding the target audience.
2. Analyze KPIs. regularly
The key performance indicators are like traffic lights for your social media marketing team and its strategies. Through likes, shares, mentions, comments, and active followers, you can see if the light is green, yellow, or red. Looking over KPIs regularly allows you to keep track of how well you’re doing on your social media accounts.
3. Original attracts
There are many ways to gain new followers through social media. You can follow trends, which is a great way to connect with young customers, and you can create your own way of interacting with your followers. Whether it’s the type of images, fonts you use or people you collaborate with, building a social media plan that reflects your brand/product/service makes you memorable.
4. Create your own lane and go full speed
Social media is all about communicating, whether it’s with a brand or a robot: people love connection. As you try different ways and find what suits best for your brand, you can create a special custom-made strategy too. For example, creating fun or sarcastic tone of posting works wonders for teens through Twitter, Instagram, etc. The reason for that is the way they perceive your brand changes. Once you come up with a certain number of followers, you can easily grow your target market.
5. Connecting through live streams after Covid
The pandemic surely changed many things in our lives. As the whole world experienced a global shut down for months, social media gained immense importance to stay connected to our families, friends, and colleagues and basically to the rest of the world. Within this period, the way people use social media platforms and the reasons for that changed as well. Now, sharing a single photo or writing a short message is simply not enough. The more people spend time on social media the longer they want to interact with who they follow. That’s why live streams are getting more and more popular. As streamers grow their follower numbers, collaborating with popular influencers in your business can be a real contribution to your 2022 social media strategies.
In Closing
While the number of social media users grows day by day, these platforms provide a great advantage in reaching new customers for business owners from every business line. Using social media marketing strategies to improve customer interaction is an effective way to discover your full potential!