If you are a social media influencer or trying to become one, you’ll know the importance of social media followers. Even if you aren’t an influencer, having followers on a social media platform is what marketers, businesses, and social media users love to have. When it comes to followers, everyone wants to have increase social media followers because a high number of followers translates into engagement, reach, authority, and exposure.
The big question, however, is: How to increase social media followers?
There isn’t any formula to increase your followers. There are, however, certain techniques and best practices that you can use to acquire more followers, increase your reach, and connect with more people on your preferred social media platform.
Here are the best techniques that will help you increase followers across all social media platforms:
1. Optimize Your Social Media Account/Profile
The first step is optimizing your social media account for attracting followers. A profile without any picture, bio, and description won’t get followers.
Profile and account optimization means you have to fill your profile completely so that your target audience can find you easily on the social platform.
Here is an example of an optimized Instagram profile that includes keywords, CTA, and URL:
Here is an example of an optimized Facebook page with complete business details:
An optimized profile ranks for relevant keywords and it gets easier for people to understand you better. If you don’t have details on your profile, people will be reluctant to follow you.
Why?
People follow others on social media on the basis of commonalities. Having an incomplete profile means people can’t get to know you, your interests, and preferences, and finding a common ground to initiate a connection gets very hard.
If I’m interested in baseball, I’m more likely to follow a person who loves baseball than any other sport.
Here are a few best practices to optimize your social media account and make it followable:
- Add your complete name, profile picture, and description
- Complete your profile, add your business details, CTA, and as many details as possible
- Update business details
- Add keywords in bio and description so that your account starts ranking for relevant keywords
- Don’t forget to add hashtags in the description
- Update your personal details such as address, date of birth, education, etc. These details help build connections and gain followers.
2. Publish Content Consistently
Publish posts regularly. Your content is what helps you drive engagement and increase your followers. If people, in general, like the content you are publishing, they’re more likely to follow you.
Nobody follows a social media account that hasn’t posted anything in 2 months. You’ll not follow such an account, right?
The first thing that people see is the type of content you have posted and how often you publish content on social media. Take care of these two via a social media content calendar that looks like this:
A social media content calendar keeps your content organized and you know what content to post and when to publish it. When publishing content, there are a few things that you must keep in mind:
- Focus on followers and publish the type of content they love interacting with since your purpose is to increase social media followers
- Publish content in different formats such as text, images, and videos
- Check analytics to identify content with the highest engagement and publish more of it to increase followers.
When publishing and scheduling content for social media, try posting positive content and avoid negative comments and remarks as much as possible.
Why?
Because positive content that’s good outperforms, gets more shares, and is liked by social media users. Positive content will increase your followers while negative content isn’t much appreciated and might backfire. You might lose followers if you constantly post negative content:
Talk good, publish awesome content to increase followers.
3. Engage
One of the best ways to increase social media followers is to engage and be part of the community. Follow others, like posts, leave comments, and be part of the community.
When you follow other users, influencers, and brands, people will return the favor and might follow you back. This is due to the reciprocity principle. Human beings are naturally tuned to returning the favor. When you follow someone, they’ll likely follow you back (to return the favor).
Importantly, when you like, comment, share, and engage on a platform, you’ll get noticed. Your profile will become visible and that’s one way of getting your profile in front of more eyeballs.
Commenting should be a part of your social media strategy as it helps you in two ways:
- You are creating content that helps you attract followers
- Your profile will get noticed, reach more people, and there are good chances of getting more followers.
4. Promote Your Social Media Account
Nothing works better than promoting your account to get more followers. You need to ask people to follow you. This is the most important step for gaining new followers at lightning speed.
Ask people to follow you.
One of the best ways is to use your social media links in your email signature. Here is an example:
Nothing fancy. You don’t have to add any images, simply add hyperlinks, and tell the world you are active on social media.
Other ways to promote your social media profile include:
- Partnerships and joint ventures with other influences and users. This is a perfect win-win technique
- Run an ad campaign to increase followers quickly. This can turn out to be expensive but if you can afford it, give it a try
- Participate in a hashtag and start using the hashtag in all the posts so that your account gets noticed whenever people search for the hashtag
- Run a social media content or a quiz
- Create a hashtag campaign. This works if you have a decent number of followers will help you to promote your campaign initially.
Conclusion
That’s how easy it is how to increase social media followers without spending a dime. All it needs is consistency and hard work to increase your followers. Once you have a certain number of followers, you’ll need to keep them engaged and hooked.
Engaged followers are your best asset as they bring more followers organically. When your followers share your posts, comment, like, or engage with your content, their activity will be seen by their friends and that’s how you’ll get new followers.
Focus on follower engagement to automate social media marketing.
Featured Image: Unsplash
