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7 Effective Tips To Grow Your Social Media Presence The Right Way

Posted By Guest Blogger 1st of April 2015 Social Media 0 Comments

7 Tips to Grow Your Social Media Presence The Right Way / problogger.netThis is a guest contribution from Adam Connell.

Have you ever wondered how to gain a significant advantage with social media? Not just in terms of growing a following but growing an engaged following?

I have too, and so have countless others.

The truth is that you can, and it’s easier than you might think.

If you’re serious about growing a more engaged following, you’ll find this post helpful. You’ll learn how to focus your efforts, boost engagement, monitor your progress and ultimately start seeing real growth.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

1. Get to know your audience

Your audience should be the focal point of your entire blog and everything you do should be based around helping them and solving their problems.

In order to do that, you need to know as much as you can about them.

Once you learn more about your audience, you will be able to use that knowledge to guide your social media efforts and create a more personal experience.

Start off by putting together personas for different segments of your audience.

Consider the following:

  • Demographics
  • Questions they have
  • Problems they’re facing
  • Their dreams
  • Preferred social networks
  • Preferred content types

You can conduct surveys and other types of research to find out more about your audience. There are plenty of tools you can use as well.

The important thing for the purpose of social media is that you get an understanding of which social networks your audience prefers, and what they prefer to share.

It’s worth having a read of Darren’s post on creating reader profiles to more tailor your content to fit the needs of your audience.

2. Identify when your audience is most active

Have you seen any of those infographics floating around the web saying when the best times to publish social media messages?

There are a bunch of them and they look smart, but the reality is that they were created using someone else’s data – not your data.

Everyone’s audience is different, so if you want to truly know when your audience is most active you need to use your own data.

Using tools like Tweriod (for Twitter) and Timing+ (for Google+) you can get a good idea of the times when your audience is most active. You can also check the “insights” section of your Facebook dashboard to find out when your audience is online, and also what types of posts they are interacting with the most.

This is an important ingredient in any effective social strategy.

3. Help people instead of selling to them

The point of social networks is to be social, and real success means helping others without asking for anything in return.

Your followers are real people and should be treated as such.

By helping people you’ll be able to stay top of mind, so when someone does need a product/service you offer, chances are that they’ll still come back to you – because you helped them.

“If you sell something, you can make a customer today. If you help someone, you can create a customer for life.” – Jay Baer

4. Focus on building real relationships

The key ingredient to making social media work is a focus on building real relationships.

This quote from Ted Rubin explains it best:

“Relationships are like muscle tissue. The more they’re engaged, the stronger they become. The ability to build relationships and flex that emotional connection muscle is what makes social so valuable.”

Instead of focusing on getting as many followers as possible, focus on creating fewer and more meaningful relationships.

Sure, you won’t get the same social proof that having a massive following will give you, but you’ll find that you get more engagement and a more loyal following. That’s what will make the difference.

This comes back to my previous point on helping.

Help people without asking for anything in return, and you’ll start to build up goodwill. In the long term the impact of this can be huge.

5. Engage, engage and engage some more

You could leave social media on autopilot – but you shouldn’t.

If you’re serious about building a loyal following, you need to engage with as many people as possible, as often as you possibly can.

Don’t just wait for others to engage, kick start the process yourself. Start a conversation.

6. Go visual and get more traction

Visuals are a powerful social media tool.

For example, Buffer found that tweets with images get 150% more retweets. And there is data to confirm this on other networks.

Before you share a text-based social message, consider whether you could share an image instead.

Thanks to free tools like Canva, it’s now incredibly easy to overlay text onto an image or create unique graphics. A great example is the use of quotes and images.

There are also plenty of sites like IM Creator and StockSnap which you can use to find high quality stock photos that won’t cost you a penny – just be sure to check the license details first.

7. Monitor your progress with the right tools and find what really works

Monitoring your social media efforts is important for a few reasons:

  • You’ll find additional opportunities to engage and build relationships
  • You can monitor your competitors and understand how their strategy fits together
  • You can monitor your own growth and gain insights into what’s working for you

There are several tools you can use to monitor your social media presence more effectively.

Cyfe

cyfeCyfe makes it easy for you to setup custom dashboards to track the metrics that matter to you.

You’ll have access to plenty of widgets which you can add to your dashboard. There are tons of other widgets that can help you with a variety of other things, not just social media.

Price: Free to use for up to five widgets, paid plans start at $19/month.

Mention

MentionMention is a great tool that is purpose built for monitoring across social networks and other websites in real time.

It’s easy to use, and you’ll get straightforward alerts whenever you get a new mention.

Once inside the platform you can respond to mentions directly so there’s no need to jump over to another social tool.

Price: Free for up to 250 mentions/month.

Oktopost

OktopostOktopost is a solid all-round social media management tool but the way it groups social messages together is extremely helpful from a monitoring perspective.

You can use the platform to share your social messages and engage with your audience directly.

The twist here is that when you add social messages, they’re added to campaigns. Those campaigns are grouped together in the reporting tab to show you the progress of each campaign.

This makes it incredibly easy to see how campaigns are performing from a birds eye view.

Price: Starts at $49/month.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumoContent plays a big part in the social media landscape so it’s important to have a tool that makes it easy to find out which content people are sharing.

Using BuzzSumo you can search for your competitors, topics and more – the results will show you which pieces of content are getting shared the most.

You can also find out who is sharing that content and engage with them from within the platform.

It’s a great tool to find out the key influencers in your niche too.

Price: Starts from free with limited results, paid accounts with reporting/analysis features start at $99/month.

Conclusion

If you want to get ahead on social media you need to focus on building lasting relationships.

Your focus should be on long term, sustainable results rather than looking for an immediate payoff.

Keep the focus on helping your audience and you will grow an engaged following.

Do you have any tips or insights to add? Let us know in the comments below.

Adam Connell is the Founder of Blogging Wizard, a website devoted to helping bloggers grow their traffic, email subscribers and online presence. If you want to get ahead on Twitter, download this free checklist to learn how to rapidly grow your following (the right way).

 

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This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Great list of tools for monitoring your success with social media. That seems to be the key, analyzing to find what works!

    I do a combination of automation and engaging with my followers. I use the automated systems to promote my content and then write posts and tweets myself throughout the day depending on what I am doing. Has been working great and has allowed me to grow my twitter following to over 2,500 in just a month!

    Chris

    • Thanks Chris!

      I like your approach, sounds like just the right amount of automation and your own tweets. The results speak for themselves – awesome work!

    • What kind of automated systems do you use to promote your content? And, are you active full-time in affiliate marketing?

  2. Adam
    Great post and the tools are very best to monitoring social media success.
    thanks

  3. Hi, Adam,

    Thanks for the info on Tweriod and Timing. I’m going to check them out now!

    Great info.
    Sue

  4. Hi Adam,

    Congrats on your guest post!

    I figure that #3 is about the most powerful because few know that helping, not selling, is the key to social media success.

    Many IMers or bloggers try to use social media to get stuff. The few smart ones use social media to give stuff.

    I may post my eBook link here and there but in between I give away free, helpful, in-depth content.

    Doing do primes the social media pump. You give freely, you get freely.

    I know the power in commenting, in helping, in chatting, in sharing and in supporting other social media users.

    I may spend 20 minutes trawling through relevant groups or my main stream, Liking updates, adding comments and supporting others. This practice is easy and it’s giving.

    The getting becomes so much easier because these supported friends will do the same for you.

    They’ll spread your word, buy your books and hire you. All because you supported them diligently over the course of weeks, or months. It doesn’t need to take years, to gain clout on social. It just takes mindfulness.

    Awesome, awesome post Adam. Great to see you here!

    Tweeting from Bali.

    Ryan

    • Thanks Ryan!

      I completely agree – #3 is a big one!

      I like how you put that – “you give freely, you get freely”. It’s definitely the way to go and it’s well worth putting in the time for because it works.

      Thanks Ryan, much appreciated!

  5. Hey, Adam! It’s great to see you over here on Problogger. :)

    When I first began my online journey, I didn’t have any social media accounts. At all.

    Now, two years later, I have followers everywhere!

    Of course, I utilitized many of the tips you have provided in this post to gain trust, respect, and a general liking from the people I’ve encountered. Being honest and forthright — in addition to being an expert — has earned me the friendship of many people… and numerous networking opportunities.

    Being consistently helpful has worked, too, although I’m helpful by nature. So, yeah, just being me helped me build my brand as others’ go-to person for writing, editing, and blogging tips. Now I also help others (average people with dreams) become published authors!

    I keep growing my followings, too. :) But I’m easily approachable, and always take the time to respond to every comment, inquiry, email, post, etc. Not many bloggers do that. I’m happy to say that I do!

    • Hey Lorraine :) Thanks for checking out my post!

      You’ve got a great approach and it really shines through looking at what you’ve accomplished, so like you say – consistently helping works!

      Very true, being approachable is so important.

  6. J'Neal Hachquet says: 04/01/2015 at 12:27 pm

    Great post! Too many people fail to monitor their progress and adapt plans as necessary.

  7. Thanks for this post, Adam! I liked your tips about tools for monitoring social media success.

  8. hello; i do a good job of engaging with people who leave comments on my site. but i’m not as good at it with social media. part of it is having to access the various networks using a screen reader. the sites don’t all play nice and neither do most of the tools being created. code writers either emphasize graphics or only create for mobile platforms. i do my best to get to know people online become friends with them and then often they help by sharing my content. thanks for sharing, max

    • Hi Maxwell, you definitely do a great job! Hopefully social media sites will step up support for screen readers in the future.

  9. Great article, Thanks for sharing sucha nice post related to Social Media.
    I thought that social media is nothing but now i am believing that social media is a very helpful for Bloggers and Webmasters.

  10. Very interesting article.

    I to am using an automated system to publish articles to popular social media websites. It’s easy to find auto posters for Google+, Facebook and Twitter but I’m having a hard time finding anything for Pinterest and Instagram. Do you have any suggestions?

    Thanks!

    • Thanks Gabe,

      You could try taking a look at: https://dlvr.it/ – I haven’t used it myself, but seems to automate a lot. It’s worth trying to post manually when possible.

      For example, different approaches work better for the likes of Google+ and Facebook.

  11. Facebook plays a great role in increasing blog visitors.I use facebook to drive about 300-400 visitors per day.
    Thanks for your post.

  12. Great article. I didn’t know that they are right tools for social media monitoring. To be honest, a little neglected my social media profiles. Maybe it’s time to catch up.

  13. All of these are great points that you mentioned in terms of using social media the right way to grow your social media presence. One thing most people tend to overlook in their Internet marketing endeavors is building meaningful relationships with their readers-social networking fans, before trying to sell them something. When you do the transformation entrepreneurial work out of inspiration looking at the bigger picture of growing sales long-term, a marketer won’t try to sell right in the moment. Instead, they will focus on building the relationship first and conversing about things not related to products and services. When you engage a customer through the soft sell approach and appeal to their feelings, it becomes “that much easier” to sell to them in the future without effort. That’s a true transformation business champion when you take the unique approach to selling by way of building a relationship with people first using social media.

  14. Thanks for including me Adam. Welcome to the ‘Age of Influence,’ where anyone can build an audience and effect change, advocate brands, build relationships and make a difference. #RonR

  15. Thank you for the tools.

    I’ll be now having something cool to track my social engagements.

  16. This is exactly why you have to love social media and get into the transformational thinking of striving to stay relevant using social networks to keep your business on people’s minds.

  17. Hello Adam

    Thanks very much for the info. For me the best is BuzzSumo

  18. To know about the timing of your audience is the key to success in social media engagement.

  19. Hi Adam,

    Thanks for the information on Tweriod I’m going to checking them now.

    Great Share!!
    Bet

  20. Hi Adam,

    Like what you said about building a lasting relationship it really works. The problem is not think about the audience and relating everything to yourself.

    The basic truth is audience should always be at the of the list and great list of social media tools

    This post is really great and helpful

    Thank you

  21. Hi Adam,

    Like what you said about building a lasting relationship it really works. The problem is not think about the audience and relating everything to yourself.

    The basic truth is audience should always be at the of the list and great list of social media tools

    This post is really great and helpful

  22. Hi Adam, superb advice, I use Tweriod myself, well I used to, it seems to come up with a error every time I try to run it on my account! Not heard of Timing+ though, will certainly be trying that one out, I also use insights a lot on my FB, certainly helps out to now when and where people are coming from on articles.

    • Tweriod sounds like Twitter on steriods!

    • Thanks Karen!

      Strange about Tweriod, works ok for me. Could try using a different browser maybe. The only alternatives that I’ve found for it are paid unfortunately. FB Insights – another great one!

  23. I like the way the online resources can connect to targeting a specific audience. Thanks for highlighting this in your insightful post. You provide a great technique on how to craft content to relate to a demographic.

  24. Hi Adam

    Thank you so much for giving me some unknown ideas. All ideas are so effective but BuzzSumo is best for me.

  25. Thanks for your post. Some nice aspects! For me is Buzzsumoe also the best one :) Greets Mike

  26. For a blog like ours, social media play a vital role as it is where users tend to share the posts most. Social media tends to give you lots of repeat visitors. So, its worth the effort that you spend to make your presence on social media platforms.

  27. That’s a great post! Understanding your audience and what they seek is really important. I also liked your suggestion as to analyzing when most of them are active, so as to sync your posting time for maximum visibility. (Y)

  28. Hello Adam,

    Thanks for sharing these valuable tips. Knowing your audience, helping them without asking anything in return, creating great interactions and of course building relationships are important for social media success. However, many people don’t pay attention to measuring their success. I also did the same mistake in the past. :) Utilizing the right tools and tracking your progress is crucial to find out what works best for you. Once again, thanks so much for the article. I’ll definitely come back to read more articles from you. Have a great day!

  29. nice tips i love all special the Engage, engage and engage some more :)

  30. I prefer digg.com, Whenever I submit a link to digg, I will get around 1000-3000 pageviews.Nice post really helped

    Cheer!

  31. Social Media is one of the major traffic channels nowadays. You can get a lot of traffic if you know how to handle these social network accounts. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many other… The world of social networks has extended, there are plenty of networks available for free. Also, presence on social networks is considered to be a SEO factor too, so it’s important.

  32. Third point which is “Help people instead of selling to them” my favorite one. Because people really don’t understand that people need to give something to this world to get something. Anyway great advises Adam. Super job.

  33. Great post, I also find Digg is useful for getting a quick hit of page views. Thank you for sharing.

  34. As a customer myself, I hate being sold but I love being helped so I agree with #3.

  35. wow, what an enlightening post. I will surely put most of this into practice

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