1 – The number of followers you have is NOT important. It is much better to have 100 quality followers, to engage with you and are interested in what you do, than 10,000 who never buy from you.
2 – Don’t look at competitor accounts and measure yourself against them. We all have different numbers of followers and ways of doing things. Someone who you’re comparing yourself with may have been in business 10 years already and have an established reputation, so please don’t compare yourself with others.
BUT, if you still want to work on growing your audience – not by thousands, but to get quality followers who are interested in what you do, here are my top tips…
1 – Follow others
A great way to get people to follow you, is to follow others. Now, I don’t mean in a spammy way, just going through accounts and following lots of people at once. I mean genuinely thinking about your ideal customer and following those types of people or following the types of accounts they might follow. Follow people in your industry, follow people in your area, follow other businesses and people who you may know.
2 – Create relationships
When you’ve started following more people, it is important to start creating relationships. You want people to build up a knowledge of what you do and to know who you are so they know, like and trust you. So, start making relationships with people, comment on their posts and send them messages (not sales messages initially, but genuine questions about themselves or their products and services).
3 – Be social
Now we’ve followed people and we’ve started making relationships with those new people, we need to remember the most important part of social media – being social. You want to start interacting with people, comment on their posts, like and share what they do, become a familiar name to them and increase your engagement.
These are the three core things to remember when trying to encourage more people to follow you. In addition to this you may want to think about running competitions, placing digital adverts, using hashtags (on Instagram and LinkedIn) creating better content, giving value (like freebies, tips or lead magnets) using video or even getting creative and using stories or reels (on Instagram or Facebook).
Once you use a combination of the above you will see your followers steadily rise, but remember social media is hard work and it takes time. Don’t let it consume you and remember – quality not quantity!
Take a look at my other blogs for further assistance.
