Chris Christoff — September 13, 2019 — September 13, 2019
Social media is, without a doubt, one of the best ways to build a loyal following of consumers that are genuinely interested in your content or products. If you just decided to create an online store or blog, you’ll want to create social media profiles for your business. According to Statista, 2.65 billion people use social media worldwide. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are an excellent way to grow your audience and improve your sales.
Many business owners struggle with the thought of building a social media audience, especially if this is their first business venture. Several questions are likely to pop up during the design and marketing phase of your social media marketing campaign.
We are going to address four of these issues and show you how to grow your audience with social media in chronological order. First, we will look at how to research your audience. Next, we will explore how you can start building your social media profiles before your website launches. Finally, we will look at ways to grow your audience by posting with your profile.
Research Your Audience
Before you can grow your audience, you have to understand the people you hope to target with your posts and marketing material. It wouldn’t make much sense to target people who don’t own pets if you run an eCommerce storefront that sells pet supplies, right?
The best way to research your audience is by seeing what consumers are talking about online. You can also track their behavior on-site if you’re at the post-launch phase of development.
We suggest going to groups on Facebook centered around your niche and reading about the struggles consumers are facing, and what it would take to make them happy. For example, if you run a marketing firm and notice that everyone on the Marketing 101 group is talking about their inability to drive customers through their sales funnel, you would want to make content that addresses this issue and offers various solutions.
If you want to grow your audience on social media, you have to resonate with their needs, goals, and pain points through your blog posts and updates. This tactic will encourage consumers to engage with your brand and read your content.
Start Promoting Online Before Launch
Just because your website isn’t live, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start using social media to grow your audience early. We suggest building a coming soon page for your website using a plugin like SeedProd. Establishing your vision for the future with a coming soon website helps build consumer excitement and encourages them to follow your brand on social media — even if your site is still in the early development stages.
A pre-launch page is excellent for your business because it gives consumers an idea of what to expect when your site goes live. You’ll also give curious readers the chance to follow your website by linking to your coming soon page on your social media site. Here the intended flow:
Step 1: Consumers see your sponsored post on their social media profile with your coming soon page.
Step 2: They are curious and click through to see what your website is all about.
Step 3: The visitors learn more about your site and see an exit popup that encourages them to follow you on social media for future updates.
Step 4: Consumers go back to your social media page and follow your brand.
Step 5: Now, you can engage with these people by creating effective content (more on that later).
After you’ve found the best coming soon plugin and created your pre-launch page, you’re ready to start growing your audience.
Create Interactive Content
Once you’ve built a small audience, it’s time to engage with those consumers using social media. Video marketing is known as one of the most interactive and engaging forms of content. A majority of consumers take in ideas visually, so creating videos based around your niche can drastically increase your subscriber count in a matter of hours.
Giveaways are another excellent form of interactive content you can use to grow your social media audience. Everyone likes winning something, and when you consider the broad range of contest prize ideas businesses can use, you’re bound to have content, products, or services that will convince users to participate in your contests. You could make tagging friends a requirement to enter the content, which spreads awareness and boosts engagement.
Finally, you could create a poll or survey on your social media profile. Consumers love voicing their opinion, and if they are passionate about your niche, they will engage with your poll. You can use this data to engage your audience and learn more about their goals and interests.
Conclusion
Social media is an excellent tool for businesses regardless of their scale. Once you’ve researched your audience, you should start building hype for your website early with a coming soon page that details your plan for the site it’s live. You can then develop and nurture relationships with your customer base pre-launch, and improve rapport as you introduce new products, services, and content to your website.
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