Globally more than 4.6 billion people use social media platforms. The average person spends more than 2 hours per day on social media across 8 accounts. This makes social media a prime medium for businesses to augment their online presence. As well as build genuine customer relationships. It also means that social media is a powerful digital marketing tool that can have a significant impact on increasing website traffic. Here’s how to grow social media organically, without solely relying on paid ads, and reap the rewards of better rankings.
Why Should You Invest in Organic Growth
Using organic growth, companies can build authentic online momentum and community. This leads to a boost in website traffic and attracts both new customers and loyalists. It’s an effective way of creating a sustainable and controlled expansion of a business’s online presence. Outside of manual time investment, organic growth has a lower financial burden and risk. Making it worth exploring in tandem with other paid advertising efforts.
5 Best Practices for Organic Growth on Social Platforms
Organic growth takes time and patience. It should be based on a consistent social media strategy that can adapt according to data and lessons learned. These five tips will help you understand how to grow social media organically.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Resonating with your customer base is vital when it comes to building a relationship with them. It determines the extent to which they are prepared to interact and repeatedly engage with your brand. Not to mention, how likely they are to buy your product or recommend it to others. To resonate with your target audience, you need to know who they are and what motivates them. For example, knowing what digital platforms they use and what content appeals most to them. As well as understanding their underlying wants and desires that will inspire them to act. Google Analytics, Meta’s Business Management Tool, questionnaires, and surveys can all provide valuable insights into target audiences and their preferences.
2. Content is King
The key way to growing organic traffic is by publishing high-quality content on social media platforms and your website. This means creating shareable content for social media as well as refreshing evergreen pages. Ideally, content should be unique or have a niche focus. It also needs to be published regularly. Using scheduling tools can save you time and money by promoting productive efficiency.
Content comes in multiple forms. For example, blog and social media posts, videos, gifs, memes, live sessions, interviews, infographics, podcasts, and e-books. Your target audience’s preferred social media platform should determine the type of content you create. Some social media platforms, like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, are specific about the types of content they permit. While others like Facebook allow many variations.
One way of gauging the success of your content is by tracking where, when, and how often it’s shared. Many social media platforms track content sharing and this data is available to users. Pinterest is the easiest platform on which to track content. Google Search can assist you in tracking Facebook content and blog post sharing. And Google Analytics can be used to see if your content has been shared on smaller sites.
3. Optimizing Profiles and Content
Creating excellent, unique content is great. But unless it’s optimized, it won’t help boost your online presence or easily be found. Optimizing content means crafting it in a way that reaches the largest audience. There are specific things that search engines look for when they crawl and index content to rank and categorize content. For example, headlines, relevant keywords and search terms, metadata and title tags, and the number of outbound and inbound links. One of the most effective ways of ensuring content and profiles are optimized is to use an SEO agency. Alternatively, content optimizing tools such as Clearscope or Dashword, can assist in the creation of relevant and search-friendly content.
When optimizing profiles, you need to ensure that you have good informative graphics and pictures in addition to well-written content. Where you can, pin what’s important or what you want to highlight to your audience. Make sure that any links you use work and load easily. Especially those that link to your website and social media platforms. A profile should be clean, and easy to read. It should make people interested in the company and entice them to use your services.
4. Engage with Your Community
Companies that engage their audience by responding to comments, likes and reviews boost their online profiles. They also foster good relationships with customers and are seen to be more trustworthy as a brand. As a result, they resonate better with their communities and more easily grow their online presence.
Successful online community engagement takes consistent effort and is a continual process. To do this, you need an engagement strategy. It needs to be based on current data about the community you want to keep interested. There are many ways you can engage with your community. For example, by creating a new member experience and spotlighting existing members, having VIP or rewards options, or asking questions and requesting feedback.
It’s all about creating an ongoing dialogue by increasing social media engagement. If nothing else, ensure that you engage with relevant followers, and comments within your newsfeeds. It’s ideal to discover feeds within the hour of new posts going up and engage right away. This tends to encourage the algorithm and lead to higher engagement.
5. Leveraging Partnerships and Collaborations
The more places and people who “talk” about your brand, the better exposure it gets and the more it’s seen as trustworthy. Aside from fostering good resonance with your online community, reaching out to relevant influencers and creators, and leveraging brand partnerships can help this process.
Before engaging anyone, decide what you want to accomplish. Decide what type of influencer you want to work with and your budget. There are four categories of influencers. Mega (+1 million followers), Macro (100 – 1 million followers), Micro (10 000 – 100 000 followers) and Nano (10 000 or less followers). Choosing the right influencer for your brand starts with knowing your target audience. This will allow you to collaborate with someone who understands and relates to your audience and their social media preferences. When assessing an influencer look at engagement rate, frequency of posts, tone of voice, perceived credibility, partnerships, and sponsorships.
Who to Ask for Help to Grow Social Media Organically
Gathering relevant data and then analyzing it so it can be used strategically is something that can be outsourced to an experienced Agency. SocialQ has a proven success rate of growing organic traffic for clients. We pride ourselves on being in the social media know, successfully identifying and keeping target audiences engaged while working collaboratively with clients. Contact Us today to chat about how we can assist you in boosting your organic traffic via social media.
