5 Proven Social Media Growth Hacks
If you launched your online business in the last few months, you will have inevitably learned about the different aspects of growing your business online. The term online marketing frequents your radar. It’s likely that you have learned about growth hacking; taking innovative approaches towards growing an online following with the hope of yielding customers and exposure for your business. Social media opens the doors for sharing exciting and interesting content directly with your followers, who are also the same people you wish to convert into paying customers. When you are starting out with social media, it can feel like you’re talking to a non-existent audience. To build momentum you need your social media pages to grow steadily in numbers, followers, likes, and subscribers.
I would like to share with you a list of 5 proven and tested growth hacking techniques that are going to steer you in the direction of social media success. There are many ways to define social media success, and one of them is constant engagement from followers with the content that you’re sharing.
1. Plan for Success
In any business venture, you must plan for success. When planning for success in social media, it’s crucial to remember that to achieve a successful result, a certain amount of time and energy is going to have to be invested to build up momentum. Each effort we make builds on top of the effort we made before, so essentially we are working towards the moment where all of our efforts begin to pay off by themselves. For example, a daily content-sharing schedule for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is going to be much more rewarding, than having a weekly schedule. Of course, the quality of content is imperative, but if we can make the habit of sharing something insightful with our followers once a day, it means we are putting our business in front of our followers more frequently, which will naturally invoke engagement. This helps to build lasting momentum where new followers are finding your pages and profiles, and becoming a part of your daily content sharing.
2. Niche vs Broad Hashtags
All the big social media networks nowadays are heavily reliant on hashtags. It’s the new way of finding, curating, and promoting content. Even Facebook adapted to the idea, and I’m constantly seeing more and more business pages promote their content with the inclusion of hashtags. In order to benefit from them the most, we need to understand them thoroughly to reap the highest rewards. It’s one thing to write a post about “social media” and give it a hashtag of #socialmedia because there are thousands of people doing this already, and it is a very broad hashtag that doesn’t yield a very big engagement rate. You need to begin looking into hashtags that are less frequent but have closely tied communities attached to them, where the engagement rate is much higher. How to go about this? The best way is to research. Take your time to dive deeper into the hashtags “market” and see if you can find hashtags that are less frequent but with more engagement.
3. Credibility & Relationships
Getting social shares doesn’t just have to happen through the process of constantly sharing new social content, you can also explore the area of business relationships, and see for yourself how beneficial it can be when your content is exposed in front a new audience. Your end goal for using social media is inevitably going to be leading people towards your website, where you can finalize a lead or sale. That’s why building content relationships with other businesses, media outlets, and bloggers is so important for gaining a long-lasting credibility status quo. Backlinks themselves are a valuable currency when it comes to search marketing, and combined with the extra social media exposure that you get, it’s something worth planning ahead for. Start with socializing your guest posting efforts, it’s a great way to start building a portfolio of sites that you are going to be writing for.
4. Organic Promotion
Your website is the ultimate social platform in itself. You have the front page of the website, which acts as the onboarding process for new clients, and you have the content area, which usually means a blog. Your blog is where you connect with your customers and community, sharing insights, stories, and interesting data that your customers would find useful. In this case, you want to ensure that your content, but also your whole website, is easily shareable on social media, to achieve this result — employ social media buttons. WordPress users can benefit from a great range of social sharing plugins that allow you to create unique combinations of social icon alignments that will greatly increase the organic social sharing rate of your business, most notably — floating sharing icons seem to work great for being exposed to the reader 100% of the time. But if you are running a standalone website, there’s no shortage of HTML templates for social icons, all of whom are easy to plug into an existing HTML page.
If the user doesn’t see social sharing buttons, he is likely going to avoid sharing your content and/or website on social media in the first place, but when the option is presented, and combined with good content, the chance of getting social shares organically goes up significantly.
5. Analyzing Social Media
One of your biggest advantages in growth hacking your social media strategy is the use of social media analytics tools. Knowing which topics and hashtags are trending can be useful in attracting a new crowd to your social pages, and having the ability to analyze the hourly performance of social shares can give you insight into the best times to share social content in the first place. If 70% of tweets are being read between the hours of 3pm and 6pm, there’s no real value in posting those tweets before those hours, and social media analytics tools can really help in this area. There are many alternatives to social analytics, as you will find in a previously published Socialnomics roundup.
What steps will you take to ensure that your social media strategy continues to grow?
