Many individuals, brands, and businesses hope they’ll wake up one day to discover their social media following has grown by hundreds or even thousands of followers.
Even if you’re doing many or all the right things, success is unlikely to come knocking at your door without incident.
Instead of trying to reverse engineer viral success, your time would be better spent creating a plan and staying steady regardless of changing algorithms and social media landscapes.
Here’s the simple, not easy growth plan for social media.
Post Consistently
People often ask how often to post, and the real answer is not twice per day at 10 AM and 2 PM EST. Such formulas have their value, but they are often catering towards minimums rather than maximums.
So, the real answer is post more often than you’re comfortable posting. If you’re posting five tweets per day on Twitter, try six or seven. If you’re posting one new image per day on Instagram, try two.
Not only are your followers not seeing all your posts, but many of them would appreciate the occasional reminder of that subscription they signed up for, the eBook they bought, the course they haven’t finished yet, and so on.
Once you’ve established consistency in posting five days per week, begin scheduling posts for off hours and weekends. You may uncover a pool of prospects you’ve never reached before.
Create Connections
Are you aware of all the players in your niche or industry? Do you maintain regular communication with them? Are you collaborating with them to get retweets and shares?
Social media is a party, and one of the best ways to show up to a party is to come prepared to socialize, schmooze, smile, and shake hands.
You can post call to actions, even broadcast your blog posts. But if you’re not spending any time connecting with your peers, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to increase your online visibility.
The same can certainly be said for connecting with your prospects and customers. Responding to their comments creates goodwill and keeps them loyal to your business.
Be as helpful as you can possibly be on every front, and you will be able to call in your own favors later.
Track Your Progress
Many social media marketers have the mistaken notion that because the platforms readily offer full transparency on likes, comments, and shares, that this is what they should be tracking.
But just because you’re using new media does not mean you should not hold social media accountable to producing real results in your project, venture, or business.
A better set of metrics would be:
- Relationships built
- Users converted to newsletter subscribers
- Sales made
If you are making no progress in these areas, readjust your plan. Look at how to cultivate real business results from social media and rebuild your strategy around it.
Conclusion
The simple, not easy growth plan for social media requires real work. The steps laid out are not complicated. But they do require you to be consistent in posting, interacting, and tracking, holding social media accountable for producing real business results, just as you would do with traditional media.