If you want to have people see your social media, you need to pay to promote it, right? Well, that isn’t necessarily the case.
Organic social media reach is still an area that businesses should focus on strengthening. Organic reach can actually build a more stable user base than paid advertising can. People who find your brand organically are more likely to have loyalty to it, and promote it themselves.
Organic social media growth allows you to build a strong foundation to rest any ad campaigns on. Here’s how you make your organic social reach stronger and more effective.
Learn Your Social Platform
Different social media channels aren’t created equal. There is a reason why each major platform (- even the ones that closely copy the others) still succeed in the market with hundreds of millions of users daily. Facebook, for example, offers users a different experience than Instagram, or even TikTok. These platforms all bring to the table different user experiences and completely different algorithms.
Before you begin to dive headfirst into building your organic social media reach by just posting and posting, you should take the time to familiarise yourself with your chosen platforms (remember our article on ‘5 Tips To Grow Social Media For Small Business‘?). Learn about social media current trends and hashtags, as well as what works in your specific industry. Learn about Instagram features and filters. Learn about Facebook analytics and page functionalities. This will help you to target each post and campaign more effectively by tailoring it for the platform you are using.
Build Your Content Strategy
The harsh truth is that you can’t simply post sales ads or stale posts on your social media and expect your brand to grow consistently. You need to have a well balanced and targeted content strategy before you can expect to build user trust, brand trust, and recognition. Here is how you develop a content strategy:
- Create a solid content release schedule, and stick to it. Users should become familiar with how often you post, and should know – consciously or subconsciously – when to expect new content from you. This can be done by looking at the engagement you currently receive – when works best to post on different platforms, different days, and times.
- Understand your key demographics for each individual platform. Don’t simply post the exact same content across each of your chosen platforms. You might have a totally different audience on Instagram than you do on Facebook.
- Balance your sales posts with other content. You should post content that is informative, engaging, and interesting as well as content for your sales. Your organic reach will rely on engagement and brand trust. You build that by holding back on the ‘sales’ aspect at times.
Generate Value
You need to give followers a reason to continue following you. If there is no actual reason to follow and engage with your content, then you will quickly see our follower count decline. It doesn’t matter what value you provide, as long as there is value. For example:
- Create videos and animated graphics that are funny or entertaining, and prompt your followers to share them with others.
- Host regular giveaways that prompt users to share and engage.
- Offer promotions or discount codes to followers of your social media.
- Share information or tips on your niche to your followers. For example, if you sell cookware, try posting unique recipes and cooking videos frequently.
These types of posts help to generate value for your users. Even if they aren’t buying from you daily, they are more likely to see value in a follow if you provide it for them. That value can turn into trust, and purchases very quickly!
Quality Over Quantity
While posting consistently is important, posting sub-par content is going to do more harm than good. Users follow pages and accounts that they feel have something to offer and stand out. If you focus on posting a whole bunch of content per day with very little care for the quality, then eventually that will grow annoying for users.
It’s best to post less frequently if it means that each post is a high-quality post. Take the time to really polish up and work on your content before launching it. In addition, never set a content release schedule that you cannot fulfill with great content. Always focus on being great!
Don’t Be Afraid to Show Your Face!
This is always a very tricky one, as most people hate it by default. However, studies on content engagement show that images and posts with real people in them generate more likes and engagement from users than anything else. This is because people like to engage with people – not faceless corporate entities. For small businesses, this is especially true!
Never be afraid to show some face, and let users see who they are engaging with directly. This will help users to feel more trustful of your brand as they now see that it is run by a real person; as opposed to a group of people or computer-generated posts.
This is also applied to the way that you personally engage with your followers. You should always take the time to reply to, and like some comments from your followers. This shows that you are engaged with your community, and helps build a relationship with your most loyal users. You don’t have to reply to every single comment, but a few per post never hurts!
Give a Call to Action
A call to action is a simple concept. It is the act of you asking your followers to like, comment, or otherwise engage with your post. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be ‘desperate’. It can happen very organically, and you’d be surprised at how willing users are to help out!
Here are a few examples of how to give an effective social media ‘call to action’:
- Encourage followers to share the post to help more users see what you are offering. This always works best with smaller following, those who directly know you.
- Ask a question at the end of your post regarding the post, and encourage your users to reply with their answers! The most common is a very simple “what do you think?”.
- Host a contest or giveaway hinging on the users sharing or commenting on a specific post or page.
- Post engaging ‘surveys’ that require your users to respond with some type of answer about things they’re interested in. For example, a dog walker may post “where’s your favourite local park to walk your dog?”.
Any way that you can naturally encourage your followers to engage with your content will help boost your content in the platform algorithms, guaranteed. After all, social media channels spend hundreds of millions each year trying to keep you on their platforms. They reward channels that keep people hitting Like, or clicking follow.
Final Thoughts
These are just a small handful of ways that you can work to build a sustainable organic reach with your brand or business social media. It’s important to build and maintain a strong level of trust in you as a business, and in your brand. You can only do that by maintaining high-quality and engaging social media presences.
So, what are you waiting for? Go tweet, post, and engage!
