The best marketing agencies will all tell you, if you don’t have a social media presence for your business you’re going to struggle to compete. Social media isn’t just for old friends to reconnect or for people to share photographs of their pets. Social media platforms have become as essential for brand awareness as having a storefront or website. It can be a daunting task to build a following when you’re new to Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, but if you invest in time to gain social media knowledge you can increase your sales.
In this latest thoughtbubble series by little fish digital, I’ll give you some social media growth hacks to help you get a following of relevant and potential customers. I’m not talking about getting likes the cheap, fast and nasty way. By going that route you just fill up your follower list with people who just aren’t interested in your product, or aren’t even human!
I’m talking about building a community of people who are likely to purchase from you in the near future. For example, a company selling glass hammers would benefit more from 100 followers who are practical joke enthusiasts than from 10,000 followers who are bots, fake profiles and competition hunters.
In this first part of the series, I’ll be discussing a growth hack for Instagram.
Instagram is a great platform for businesses especially those that have products that are visually appealing on photographs or those that utilise videography to showcase their products. Posting engaging and educational content consistently, not too little and not too frequently, is the first step to grow your audience.
However, there is an easy method to help scale this growth quickly. This is the kind of social media growth hack where the more time you invest into it, the faster you can get results. It involves targeting the followers of your competitors, or similar businesses. With this data, you can engage with these users as a form of free advertising.
Take a look at the 3 steps below to learn how to do this.
First things first, you need to know, or at least estimate, what your ideal customer is interested in. The most predictable thing would be the product. The glass hammer company would want to find people who follow companies that sell the same or similar products, so ideally they would also glass hammers.
By searching hashtags, you can find competitors who are posting about this topic. In the example below, the search is bringing up posts for #glasshammer - if there are other glass hammer products out there, this would likely help us find the companies selling them.
You can also follow hashtags as you would someone’s account. This means you’ll see posts in your news feed about glass hammers, allowing you to keep track of the market.
Once you’ve clicked on the hashtag, you’ll see a grid of posts from different people and, more importantly, competitors. Once you’ve found the most relevant business, you can then access their follower list.
Most businesses are easy to identify as they will have their services in their bio (like in the screenshot below). The glass hammer company’s competitors may have something like “Making theoretically ridiculous practical jokes a reality for our customers in the United Kingdom, with SMASHING results 🤣.”. Plus there is likely to be a logo rather than a photo of a person.
So once you’ve landed, you can see the number of followers a competitor has. It’s a good idea to go for the profiles that don’t have huge numbers of followers. Or if the “following” number is higher than the “followers” - this is evident of a follow, follow back strategy where this business has followed lots of people in an attempt to get people to follow them back.
This is a good strategy to grow your following but these people are unlikely to show a genuine interest in your offering. One strategy I do not recommend is to follow, get the follow back, then unfollow! You will annoy people pretty quickly with this, and are less likely to be taken seriously AND can face a possible ban.
I digress… the next step is simple, just click on the account followers number and you will be presented with a list.
Now all you need to do is go through each follower and check out their posts. You’ll find a few that will be set to private, but don’t worry about these - just return to the list and check the next profile below. You can make a rough estimate from their bio and posts whether they are in your demographic and service area. The glass hammer company would be looking for people with posts about playing practical jokes on their peers.
I tend to like the first two or three posts, and if someone fits my demographic perfectly I’ll like a few more (yes, I did like my own post in the example below - someone has to...). Once you’ve clicked on one post, you should be able to scroll through the rest. And if you want to take it to the next level, leave a comment with a thought invoking question to create conversation.
There we have it - if you invest time in this strategy I guarantee you will get followers from it. As soon as a post is liked, a person will receive a notification showing who liked it. And that means they will be seeing your business, and may take a look at your brand and like it as a result. Try combining this outreach exercise with the timing of a new post to see if it improves the chances of getting followers.
I’d love to hear if you’ve implemented this strategy, how it worked for you. Drop me an email at chris@littlefish.digital for feedback.
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