Now that you’ve reached your audience with great posts, you might be wondering how you can get even more likes, tweets, and overall popularity. Social media can be addictive, even when you’re a business.

The simplest way to increase your followers on social media is by inviting your current customers, employees, and business partners to like/follow your social media pages. Facebook allows you to upload an email list to find people you may already do business with. Uploading your email list can speed up the process and ensure that you connect with everyone you already know.

What can you do after that? Getting more popularity takes patience, but here are three good ways to speed up the process.

1. Use Social Media Analytics

To know how to build more popularity, it’s useful to know which posts are the most popular. Then, you’ll know what kind of content to create in the future.

Each platform has a built-in analytics system, like Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics. There are also additional analytics tools for specific channels, like Followerwonk for Twitter or ViralWoot for Pinterest. There are even multi-channel analytics tools, like Buffer.

If you haven’t utilized Twitter Analytics, do so by using your Twitter username/password to log in to analytics.twitter.com. The data will start to populate for you to view on a monthly basis. This is the best way to know who your top followers are, what tweets were most engaging, etc.

Google Analytics includes default social media channel groupings, which allows you to further analyze social media traffic to your website. Depending on your goals, you may want to know how long social media users lingered on your website, how many pages they visited, and/or if they became a lead through web form tracking.

2. Cross-Promote Your Channels and Content

If you’ve worked hard to create a large audience on one channel and are now expanding into a new channel, make sure your audience knows about your new channel. Promote your new social media handles and url to your current audience. This way, you won’t need to start from scratch building an audience on your new channel.

Likewise, you can promote new content on all of your relevant channels. As mentioned inPart 1, Snapchat videos work well with YouTube, and a still image from a video can be posted on Instagram, Twitter, etc. Be careful to adjust the content for each platform, though. Don’t use the exact same post for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others. Tweak each post according to what’s best for each platform. A shorter post is more appropriate on Twitter, for example, while longer posts and polls are ideal for Facebook.

 

3. Promote Social Media Outside of Social Media

Social media posts can be relevant on all marketing channels, not just on a few websites. Once you’ve established a social media strategy, are posting consistently, and feel confident about your online content, start to integrate social media into your other business messaging and marketing channels.

Not sure where to begin? Here are some suggestions: business cards, email messages, email employee signatures, promotional signage, phone messages, employee scripts, etc. Including information about your social media on these channels opens up more possibilities for people to find and connect with you online – even if you met offline.

You can take this idea a step further by leveraging social media content in your customer service inquiries or sales prospecting. When customers have questions or comments, you can support your answer by referring to specific blog posts.

Make sure you directly answer their questions first, though. For example, if a customer asks about pet-friendly apartment options, you should answer their question, thensuggest sending them a blog post about moving with pets as a reference for later on. Get their contact information and follow-through.

You may not be able to reach this point in a few weeks or months, but if you consistently take time to strategize, create content, and promote your posts, you’ll eventually be ready to involve social media in nearly any situation.

 

A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media

Part 1: Developing a Strategy

Part 2: Reaching Your Target Audience

Part 3: Increasing Your Popularity