Ever wonder how popular brands effortlessly gain loyal followers? Learn the scientific methods to increase your social media following, enhance conversions, and improve customer experiences.
Step up your social media game with a name that really reflects who you are. Our Social Media Name Generator can help you find the perfect fit!
Let’s get right into it!
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1. Post At Optimal Times
Here at CoSchedule, we’ve done the research and found the best times to post on social media! Here are our findings: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday:
- 8:41 a.m.
- 3:15 p.m.
- 7:00 p.m.
While there is still mileage in posting through the morning (more on that next), schedule the updates you want to convert most with, like blog posts, at these times.
2. Track Your Socials Effectively
This LinkedIn newsletter from DataDriven Pro shows how to track your social media traffic using Google Analytics 4.
When tracking your socials, Google Analytics 4 can show you:
- The number of visitors who came to your website from social media.
- The social media platforms that drive the most traffic.
- The most visited pages on your website.
- The actions visitors take on your website.
Use these insights to gauge how your social media campaigns perform and adjust accordingly.
3. Share Often To Get More Followers
The folks over at Beevolve recently posed the question: If you tweet more, will you get more followers? And, well, the short answer is yes:
The more you share, the more followers you will get. This could be for a few reasons:
- You become more practiced and effective at tweeting.
- You’re more active and interact with more people.
- You have a larger volume of valuable tweets for people to interact with.
But while it’s not clear whether this is correlation or causation, it doesn’t really matter. Tweeting more will increase the amount of followers you have in one way or another.
4. Get More Followers By Informing
In the world of social media, you’re unknowingly categorized into two separate camps:
- “Meformers:” People who talk only about themselves.
- Informers: People who bring value to the table.
Search Engine Journal found 11 proven tips to increase your follower count. Two of which are actively engaging your audience and posting share-worthy content. Winning content is of value to the reader. Focus on curating valuable, outward-facing social messages with a personal touch, and followers will flock to you.
5. Be Positive, Always
When in doubt, post positive content. The more negative remarks you make, you make, the fewer followers you’ll get:
Not only does positivity help you get more followers, Neil Patel also analyzed data that suggests people are much more likely to share positive content, especially when it connects to these emotions:
- Curiosity
- Amazement
- Interest
- Astonishment
- Uncertainty
Get the followers and shares your content deserves by posting positive social messages.
6. You Have One Hour To Keep A Follower
According to Lithium, 52% of people who Tweet your brand expect you to respond within one hour (even if you’re a solo blogger, you’re a brand). If you don’t respond, they’re likely to punish you by either negative word-of-mouth, unfollowing, or other means. If you do respond in a timely manner:
- 34% are likely to buy more from you.
- 43% are likely to spread positive word of mouth.
- 38% will be more open to your advertisements.
- 42% will share your good work with their friends.
That means not only is responding quickly good for your business now, but it’s also good for lead generation and the future of getting more followers.
7. Cash In On Daily Trends
While it might not be fitting for your business to hop on the bandwagon, it turns out there is actually an optimal day for everything trendy on social media:
Three Girls Media found that different days of the week had different connotations for people, as well as different trends. There are many content opportunities out there, and your feed might not fit all of these categories. That’s ok! But, there are specifics like quotes or humor you can use no matter your industry:
8. Take Care Of The Little Guy
At first glance, you may think you need to attract influential users to your brand. But the truth, as confirmed by Mention, is that 91% of the people who talk about your brand will have less than 500 followers:
Every share is a good one, so be sure to acknowledge as many shares as you can.
9. Use Large Twitter Cards For 3x More Interactions
Research from Everywhere Marketer found that large Twitter summary cards create 3x more interactions than any other form of card:
While you may not be able to use these for every update due to the code that has to be embedded into your page, it’s beneficial for:
- Blog posts
- Promotions
- Surveys
- Generation tools
- Sales pages
Where you can, display them in a larger, more informative manner, like this one:
To get this card, simply head to this developer page and copy this code:
10. Include Images With Facebook Updates
McCallister Marketing found that adding images to your Facebook updates will generate more engagement. Using an engaging photo you can catch viewers’ attention and stop their scroll.
Recommended Reading: 15 Top-Performing Facebook Post Ideas
11. Use Video To Reach More People
Compared to the organic reach of photos, studies show that videos receive more clicks than images. You don’t have to be the one who created that video content, either. You just need to upload it. Facebook might have been the start, but you can now experiment with video on many networks: Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+ (well, YouTube) all have ways to use video to reach your audience.
12. Share Quality Images On Instagram
Social Media Examiner reveals that people can process visual data (like an Instagram post) in 100 milliseconds. This is much faster than reading a caption or longer-form content. That being said, make sure you’re sharing a captivating image to grab your viewers’ attention with quality content.
13. Avoid Over-Posting
A big part of getting more followers is keeping the ones you’ve already got, but if you’re guilty of bulk posting, that could be problematic. The main culprit to losing followers is flooding their feed. Post consistently, but there’s no need to shove it down their throats. Take advantage of social scheduling tools (like CoSchedule) to space out your posts across days, weeks, or even months instead of posting multiple at once.
14. Freebies + Offers = Fans + Followers
Take advantage of freebies and offers to increase engagement throughout your audience. More than half of them are primed and ready to engage with you. Create a competition or offer involving retweets and shares, and you have a campaign that will draw attention and generate a buzz.
15. Tap Into The 5 Essential Emotions
There’s no way around it. The more shares, mentions, likes, and retweets your social campaign gets, the more followers you’ll pick up along the way. But, what most social campaigns miss out on is emotion. And by doing that, you miss out on a huge opportunity to get more followers. Hubspot found that these four emotions drive marketing the best:
- Happiness
- Sadness
- Anger
- Fear
See what feels right; try to combine two or three of these into any social media message.
16. Embrace The 3 Most Shareable Colors On The Internet
Are you considering the importance of color choice in your content? A Researcher from Penji studied over 1,000,000 images on Pinterest and discovered that using red, pink, and purple in your graphics generated the most shares and interactions. Try incorporating a multitude of colors into your next social media image by making them the focal point of your text or the main image. The results could shock you.
17. Maximize Followers By Analyzing Competitors
Neil Patel posted an interesting blog post about how to steal your competitor’s followers. One of the most interesting aspects of that study—that you can use right now—is approaching their neglected fans. By running a competitor’s Facebook page through FanPage Karma, you can see an analysis of Facebook trends, habits, and posting schedules. But, more importantly, you can locate your competitor’s neglected followers.
Swoop in by:
- Interacting with these people.
- Providing insights or answers the company isn’t.
- Building a community presence.
Then, you can count on those followers to naturally gravitate to your page in the future.
18. Be Authoritative About Who You Are
Most people like authority; it’s just built into them. People who identify as an authority have more followers than those who don’t. Identify yourself as who you are in the best possible light, just like you would on your resume. A credible, authoritative description provokes an instant decision on whether someone is worth following.
19. Appearances Do Matter
Later.com suggests having a brightly colored background on your profile picture can greatly impact the number of followers you get. But you might think, “I can’t have a profile picture like that; I’m a business’. For you, a simple logo picture will still be effective like Salone Monet does here:
20. Jump On The #Hashtag Bandwagon
As much as you might think hashtags are silly, they’re an incredible marketing tool. Hashtags are not only a big part of how we use social media but they also help you get more followers more effectively.
Here’s a piece from LinkedIn explaining the impact of #shareacoke, and how it generated hundreds of millions of posts and shares.
21. Post Milestones To Boost Organic Reach
LinkedIn found that posting milestones could seriously help you boost the amount of people you can reach. For example, when you use the word, ‘congratulations,’ more people pick up on your post. This also appears to have carried on over to other milestones, too, such as:
- Weddings
- Graduations
- Landmark trips
- Babies or birthdays
- Awards
Here’s an example of how Macy’s collaborated with International Concepts to celebrate their birthday:
22. Write Super-Catchy Copy
What you write on social media matters, as does how you write it. Brands, in particular, tend to write sales-driven posts that simply aren’t engaging. Prioritize writing exceptional post copy. Spend time crafting your posts instead of just slapping the first thing you think of on your social channels and calling it a day. Here are a few pointers:
- Avoid anything that sounds like spam or includes a hard call-to-action.
- Try to keep your post lengths reasonable.
- Make use of image text. Using images to tell more of the story can make writing clear, crisp, and concise posts easier.
23. Connect With Interesting People
It’s easy to forget that social media is about being, well, social. Brands tend to place sales first and conversation second. However, they fail to realize that they have that equation backwards. The solution here is simple: talk to people. Respond to all your Facebook comments. Tweet a shout-out to someone you think is crushing it out there. Whatever you do, connect.
TIP: You don’t have to wait for someone to talk to you first. Go out there and strike up a conversation. Twitter is a particularly great network for this.
Recommended Reading: Influencer Marketing Strategy
24. Follow Others
Everyone wants an enormous tribe of loyal social media followers. However, you have to give a little to achieve that. Follow other accounts in your industry and people who follow your brand. This accomplishes two things:
- It makes it easier to monitor what your followers are talking about on social media (so you can create content that addresses those interests).
- It prevents you from looking anti-social. This is especially true on Twitter. Just be sure to stay within Twitter’s best practices.
The more accounts you follow, the more opportunities you have to connect with others. If you stay within reason and follow accounts you genuinely find interesting, you’ll attract more and similar followers.
25. Insert Shareable Content
Incorporate graphics that make it easy for your audience to share your content independently. For example, consider adding infographics or quote graphics that add context to your blog post. This is a tactic we use at CoSchedule all the time. It’s a great way to get more mileage from your efforts and provide you with the kind of easily shareable content that can attract more followers.
26. Be Consistent
Posting consistently is often a tough task to manage. Using a tool (such as Requeue with CoSchedule or others) can help you maintain a consistent posting schedule across all your social channels. This is essential for engaging, retaining, and growing an audience.
The consistency doesn’t stop there. It’s also important that your messaging remains consistent across networks too. If you’re building a cross-channel campaign, ensuring all messages across networks support the same overarching campaign theme is important.
27. Include Social Sharing Buttons
It’s frustrating to read a great article only to find there are no convenient social media buttons to share it with your followers. Including social sharing buttons in optimal locations on your pages makes it easier for readers to share your content. That, in turn, increases your ability to reach more people and grow your following.
28. Sometimes, You Gotta Pay To Play
Paid promotion works well on social media when done correctly. Twitter even provides guidelines on how to build campaigns specifically to gain followers. Sources like these can offer insightful information about how to get more followers and how to keep them.
29. Use A Click-To-Tweet Plugin
Click-to-tweet plugins serve as attractive clickable boxes for easy sharing. With the use of click-to-tweet plugins, you’ve allowed your audience to share your content at the click of a button.
Including click-to-tweet buttons makes it easy for readers to share your posts effortlessly. Here are two WordPress plugin options to consider:
- Click To Tweet by CoSchedule (hey, we made this!)
- Click To Tweet by Warfare Plugins (another excellent option from our friends)
Both of these plugins are easy to use and can help attract Twitter followers.
30. Upgrade Your Email Signature
Avoid your brand getting lost between the cracks in the realm of emails. Give them an easy way to find your company on social media. To do so, drop links to your brand’s social profiles in your email signature for a quick win. If you use Outlook, it’s even possible to add actual social media icons to your signature.
Here are some examples of eye-catching and accessible email signatures from Wisestamp:
