If there’s one thing that has come to matter almost as much as money today, it has to be the tremendous power of “reach.”
Whether it be tapping through stories on Instagram or expanding user bases using Google Ads – every brand and personality has come to realize the value of voice and influence that social media reach lends to you.
As much as your reach is valued today, it is equally harder to achieve it in this day and age. The reasons are pretty self-explanatory if you think about it. With the sheer volume of content that is floated all over the internet daily, you really have to be loud, novel and valuable for your voice to stand out and make a difference.
While the boomer generation is awfully tempted to label attempts to maximize social media reach as an exercise of attention-seeking, this cannot be further from the truth.
Gaining traction and securing social media visibility is about making noise and ensuring you’re heard. In this day and age, social media visibility is a low-lying prerequisite for a worthwhile brand-building exercise.
Listed below are seven strategies, sworn on by social media experts, that have generated tangible growth by garnering engagement on the big bad internet.
7 Social Media Strategies To Increase Visibility
1. Know Who Is Watching You
With a scope so vast and an audience as wide, it is only human to get intimidated by the volume of content that’s available online. However, if you want the content you’re generating to make substantial growth and progress, it is essential to know who you’re creating content for.
Demographic knowledge is the hidden arm of digital marketing on which the AdTech empire has flourished. It may seem trivial, but it is essential for you to know who your users are – their age, their gender, their ideologies, where they come from and what they aspire to be. These are all aspects of information that will help you build a connection between your brand and its end users. In addition, once you know who is consuming your content, you will be able to tailor it to their needs, bringing you closer to your customers and humanizing your brand.
2. Humanize Your Brand – Lend It a Personality
Presence on social media goes hand in hand with constant judgment-making. Your end customers will arrive and spend time on your page when you offer them more than just your products. Offer them a personality to look up to and a human to engage with. Some of the best campaigns in history have been ones that have humanized the brands they work for.
The success of the Starbucks Marketing Experiment, for example, lies less in its grandiose budget and more in the sentiment that it exudes. The marketers behind the Starbucks brand-building exercise have successfully nailed the “neighborhood coffee boy” persona, which has lent the company the warmth and love of millions worldwide.
Your brand’s voice on the internet must be authentic and iconic simultaneously. The minute you lose the brief, you lose your voice. Unfortunately, the internet can get quite unapologetic about that.
3. Talk It Out!
People on the internet want to know that your brand is as authentic as you claim it to be. Who likes engaging with a chatbot anyway, right?
One of the key ways you build on social media traction is when you talk to your consumers.
The Twitter handles of Zomato, Swiggy and the likes have successfully nailed this strategy.
Asking your audience about their opinions, responding to their grievances and sharing some fun banter on the internet goes a long way in building a community of loyal customers and clients.
4. Stay Alert On Trends
The algorithm favors the favored. If you want to make it to the for-you pages of people you’ve never tapped into before, you will have to step outside your comfort zones. Instagram has been mischievously ahead of the line when it comes to supporting trends. Whether using trending audios for reels or taking up on challenges – following what’s getting everyone hooked will increase your chances to go viral by approximately seven times.
Also, make sure you’re up to date with the social calendar. Create relevant and topical content. For instance, let’s say you’re a perfume and fragrances brand. Such a brand would require a relevant voice on Valentine’s Day. Running an ad campaign on Instagram will probably get you a few more brownie points if your content is engaging and captivates the masses.
5. Three Words: Call to Action
In the age of transparency, everyone knows when they are getting tricked into something. Unfortunately, your audience expects you to be authentic, and when you serve them ridiculously sponsored content, the trusted thread is likely to fall short and eventually break.
When you attach a clear call to action to your content, you’re being honest and upfront with what you want. Consumers love transparency and honesty.
When you use crystal clear words like “buy,” “download,” or “follow,” you’re giving your consumers a direction to follow. And if you’re good at what you do, they will!
Invest in good copywriting that lays down your brand’s intentions clearly and crisply. Hire a good content writer and leave the task of communicating the call to action to them.
6. Use Hashtags Smartly
This particular piece of advice has been hashed around the internet so often, but it has still maintained its ground in most places because of its utility. Hashtags allow you to get discovered on the internet. But that doesn’t mean you lay down your entire marketing model on the shoulders of hashtags.
Hashtags are a double-edged sword that only works well when you understand the psyche of the content. For example, if you use a hashtag unrelated to your product, you’ll generate little to no traction. On the other hand, if you use a hashtag with an enormous number of posts, you might end up having your post lost in the middle of the sea of posts. In contrast, if there are too few posts on the hashtag, you might not tap into relevant crowds at all.
Your hashtags should be a consistent and carefully curated mix of relevance and reach for them to work right.
7. Find Your Tribe
Valuing user-generated content is a must for any brand trying to build a community around its product. A brand page engaging with and reposting user-generated content communicates trust and value to its consumers. It allows consumers to feel that they’re a part of the brand, which leads them to be more loyal than ever to their choices.
From time to time, Nike and Burger King have experimented with user-generated content that has shown fantastic numbers and generated great results for the brands – absolutely organically.
Building traction on social media is an act of commitment and a grand exercise in forming a long-term relationship with a vast mass of people.
Nurturing social media presence is similar to forming and following through human social relationships. It requires you to be empathetic, understand the needs and wants of your consumers, listen to and relate with them and be as honest in your intentions as possible.
On the other side of the barter, you’re most likely to find a deeper understanding of what your audience stands for and likes.