Growing a Social Media Audience

One of the first steps to promoting your business on social media is deciding that you are going to make use of social media networks.

The second is to build an audience.

It makes no sense to spend time establishing a social media strategy, developing your marketing pitch messages, and scheduling them when you have no one to talk to.

The reality is that people will not just flock to your page and your initial audience consisting of your employees and relatives won’t help you accomplish the goals you should have already defined in your social media marketing strategy.

So now what? How do I grow an audience organically?

You’re not alone. Growing your audience will take some time, but we’ve put together a number of tips that can accelerate your audience growth.

1. Include links to your social networking sites on your email signature. Think about it, every time you send an email, you are sending a message or reminder to your contacts asking them to connect with you on social media.

2. Business Cards should include the names of your social media networks that mean the most to you. Don’t forget the back of the card, there is valuable real estate there to list or include QR codes directly connecting to your social networking sites.

3. Have a complete profile on each of your social networking sites. Complete means including the URL connections to not only your business website but also to the other social networking sites you have for your business.

4. Ask! Most commonly overlooked way to organically grow your social networking audience is to simply ask people to “like us on Facebook”, “follow us on Twitter”, “connect with me in LinkedIn”, etc.

5. Like or Follow other relevant business pages from your business page. Often times, these businesses will reciprocate and Like or Follow you back!

Growing an audience for some can be a competitive sport. Be careful in how you go about this. There are many opportunities out there to “buy an audience” or “like us and we will like you”. These approaches are not recommended, generally don’t work, will result in little to no interaction with your page, posts, or updates and could in fact have a negative impact on things like Facebook’s Page Rank.

What are you doing to grow your audience? What steps are you taking? Comment and share!