When people think about a large social media audience, they think about getting more followers or likes. They will type in phrases like the classic “How To Get More Twitter Followers” and hope to find the secret ingredients to Twitter success.
In the beginning, you must learn how to grow your audience. That way, you can start seeing results. However, there will be a point when your audience is growing at a consistent rate.
What happens then? How does the audience get bigger? Do you search “How To Get More Twitter Followers” so you can discover how to gain 501 Twitter followers every day instead of 500 Twitter followers every day?
The next significant way to grow your audience is to keep the individuals within your current audience. If you gain 500 Twitter followers in one day, but you also get unfollowed by 500 people on the same day, then your Twitter audience didn’t grow at all. If you had 10,000 Twitter followers yesterday, then you’ll have the same number by the end of the day.
On social media, the art of growing your audience consists of two factor:
- Getting more followers/likes per day
- Getting less unfollows/unlikes per day
Since most people cover the first factor in great detail, I’ll choose to talk about the second factor in greater detail. When it comes to keeping the people in your audience, these three tips come in handy:
#1: Be Active
Being active on social media is critical for building trust, getting more followers, and keeping your followers. Some of my friends who forgot to tweet for a day ended up getting unfollowed by 20 extra people on that day. Harsh, but nevertheless, the reality of a social media audience.
More than a billion people use social media. While it highlights social media’s rapid success as a whole, it also indicates we have options. There are countless social media experts. If the average social media expert stops blogging, then no big deal. There are millions of other social media experts to choose from.
Being active on your social networks lets you gradually build a name for yourself. The people in your audience will begin seeing your social media posts more often. These people will engage with your posts and share your content.
If you put in so much time to building your social media platform, then you must utilize that platform. At one point, I didn’t send anymore pins for my Pinterest account with over 22,000 Pinterest followers (I now hired someone for that).
I got less blog traffic at that time than when I had 500 Pinterest followers and sent a few pins per day. In other words, I got more traffic from 500 Pinterest followers than I got from 22,000 Pinterest followers, and it was my fault.
The moment you find yourself stretching your boundaries, stop. Before expanding into new horizons, discover methods that allow you to save a significant amount of time or outsource some of your social media activities to someone else.
#2: Post Valuable Content
No matter how active you are on social media, you must always post valuable content. Bloggers praise valuable content to their audiences as often as parents praise veggies to their children.
Out of curiosity, I wondered what would happen if someone posted on social media so often but didn’t provide much value. Would someone, say, with over one million tweets have a large audience.
It turns out posting lots of bad content doesn’t help grow a large audience. Three Twitter accounts with over 1 million tweets each prove the assertion very well. Take a look:
- @Aviongoo: 1.68 million tweets later, the account has a little over 300 Twitter followers.
- @Market_JP: 1.56 million tweets later, the account has under 400 Twitter followers.
- @ATNews: 1.19 million tweets later, the account has a little over 200 Twitter followers.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to discover these accounts are posting low value content. Just because you are sending more social media posts than your competitors does not mean you are doing any better.
The value you provide with your social media posts determines the overall impact of your platform…and the number of people who decide to stick around.
#3: Engage With Your Audience
Each time someone tweets one of my blog posts, I make it a point to thank the person or favorite the tweet. Doing this lets the person know I care and appreciate the support.
Your audience helps you become more successful. While building relationships helps you reach new audiences, the people who share/read your content and/or buy your products help make you successful.
When you engage with your audience, you are engaging with the same people who help you become more successful. It’s the least we can do to support our audiences.
There are people in your audience who have been following your journey for a while. These people would feel honored if they got a response from you. Other people in your audience are looking for answers to some of their problems. Answer those questions, and the people in your audience will be grateful.
Engaging with your audience will effectively humanize your social media efforts. The entire point of automating social media posts is to open up more time to engage with your audience. When the term “social media” was coined, it included the word “social” for a reason.
The most meaningful relationships I have had with individuals within my audience started from conversations on social media. You never know where one conversation can take you and your brand.
In Conclusion
Many people focus on growing their social media audiences. Although an admirable approach, it becomes easy to forget the importance of keeping the audience you have already built. If you gain 100 Twitter followers on the day you lose 100 Twitter followers, then your audience size will remain the same.
Once you master growing your social media audience rapidly and keeping most of the people within your audience, you will find it much easier to grow a large social media audience.
What are your thoughts about growing a social media audience VS keeping the one you have? Which of the two do you think is more important? Do you have any other methods for keeping social media followers? Sound off in the comments section below.
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