So you took the time to set up your social media pages for your business. Great work! What happens next is critical to your social media success, and you’ll need the right growth hacks to make an impact.
Keep in mind, the single most important factors for your social media success are still:
- Posting local content
- Boosting content
You’ll need to keep doing both of those things even as you implement the growth hacks we suggest below. Essentially, all of these hacks should circle back to local content and boosted posts.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to talk about as far as local content and boosting. We suggest you read some of our other articles on these topics as well, such as:
- 5 Common Pitfalls in Social Media Marketing for Small Business
- Facebook Boosting 101: How to Boost Content for Better Results
- Facebook Ads and Hyper-Local Content: Your Recipe for Social Media Success
In the meantime, try out the growth hacks below to take your social media presence from “meh” to great.
Growth Hack #1: Activate Employees and Micro-Influencers
The trends don’t lie: Nowadays, you have to get employees and micro-influencers involved with promoting your brand. Social media audiences are more likely to trust content and recommendations that don’t come directly from the brand itself.
You can activate these brand advocates in several different ways:
- Partner with micro-influencers who have an established social media following. It doesn’t need to be huge, and they don’t need to be celebrities. In fact, content coming from “regular” people who have a moderate following will tend to be viewed as more trustworthy. When they promote your brand, they reach all of their followers — people you might not have reached if you tried to promote to them directly.
- The same principle applies to your employee advocates. When they post about your brand, they reach all of their own personal friends and followers — again, people you otherwise might not have been able to access.
- Formalize an advocacy program that enables your advocates to either share brand-approved assets or post about your brand. Rallio’s leaderboard and advocacy tools make it easy to track progress and reward your advocates.
Learn more: rallio.com
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Growth Hack #2: Go Live
While Facebook and Instagram “live” features have been around for some time, they’ve become even more important and useful during the pandemic. This trend isn’t going away, and the sooner you take advantage, the quicker you can grow. Consider the following:
- Businesses that have had to close their physical doors have been able to maintain or grow by going live. In-person classes, concerts and other happenings became virtual events with captive audiences that are using social media all day long.
- Live video had already been growing in popularity before the pandemic, and the trend is only going to accelerate. Entrepreneur reports, “Go Globe estimates that as much as 82 percent of online traffic will be dedicated to live video by the end of 2020.”
- Getting your live video strategy up and running will help you immediately start appealing to your audience while also setting you up for success going forward. Even if and when COVID-19 is no longer a global and local threat, you will want to prepare for the possibility of future disruptions to business — it’s not out of the realm of possibility, as this pandemic has taught us.
Learn more: 25 Live Video Stats Marketers Need to Know in 2020
Growth Hack #3: Mention Other Accounts
When you post, tag and mention other accounts and influencers whenever possible. When you employ this strategy correctly, you’ll strengthen relationships with key accounts and foster new connections. Keep the following points in mind to avoid any missteps:
- Don’t simply mention a brand out of the blue just to try and get attention. Your mentions should be authentic. The simplest method is to mention your employee and brand advocates anytime they mention you. Repost their content in stories, highlight them in posts, basically return the favor when they post about your brand. This reciprocity helps you build a relationship and builds confidence among your influencers by rewarding them for their mentions.
- You can also mention other non-competing brands when it’s a product or service you actually use and swear by. Again, don’t just mention for the sake of mentioning.
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Growth Hack #4: Get Involved in Conversations
When you post something, don’t think of it as a “mic drop” moment where you walk away and never have to return to that post again. Monitoring comments and interacting with your audience as they post is one of the simplest growth hacks — and you might actually enjoy it! Things to think about:
- When someone comments and you comment back, not only does it help to build relationships, but it also improves your engagement on the account. When there’s an increase in engagement on posts for a page, your posts will get more visibility, particularly if you’re boosting content.
- As a busy business owner, you might not have the time to dedicate to social media conversations. Rallio has Social Strategists who are dedicated to this very task, so you can always outsource to us if you want to make sure those important conversations don’t get missed.
Growth Hack #5: Check Up on Your Competitors
Your competitors presumably have social media pages — if they don’t, well, then you’re the one staying ahead of the game. Find out what they’re doing on social media so you can use that intel to inform your own strategy:
- Navigate to Facebook’s Ad Library and search your competitors by name. You can also access a page’s ad history by navigating directly to their Facebook page; look for the Page Transparency link. Facebook will show you what ads they have running currently or ran in the past, the amount spent, impressions, demographics and other information about the ads. While you won’t know the results of these ads, you can at least get an idea of their advertising strategy.
- Bear in mind that you don’t have to do things exactly the way your competitors are. You might see their ads and think, “Hmm, I can do that better” (you probably can!). You might even see that they’re not running any ads at all (it does happen)! The goal is not necessarily to duplicate your competitors, but to discover your competitive advantage and differentiators.
Bonus Hack #6: Think Bigger
Your social media pages have the potential to help you grow your business if you maximize their potential.
The growth hacks above will help you step outside your comfort zone and try things a little bit differently. It might just be the little extra push needed to help you grow your business the way you want it to.
