Social media is one of the best areas to explore to get followers, subscribers, and building traffic.
It is not enough that you look for leads—it is equally important that you constantly look for ways to make people stay in your group and remain loyal.
But how do you do this?
Today, I will share with you some techniques on how to build a loyal following in social media.
These techniques are:
- Establish Brand Identity
- Engage with Your Audience
- Enhance Your Content’s Quality
- Provide Frequent Updates
- Be Open for Collaborations
By the end of this tutorial, you should have a clear roadmap on how to grow your social media channels.
Establish Brand Identity
To make yourself known, you need to build a brand.
No, I am not talking about logos. A brand is more than that—what you need to do is to build a personality.
It can be advantageous for your business if you provide your audience with your real-life success story. Aside from your brand name, this will be the first thing that the visitors will notice, especially if your story is not ordinary.
State when and how you started, why you chose your niche, your experiences, failures, and successes. Your brand must be a personality—not just a faceless entity.
If you haven’t set your company’s missions and visions yet, you should start building them. Apart from text, the content that you post on your social media channels must embody these two things.
It is important that you practice consistency because a lot of eyes are on your brand. Every statement that you give will affect your business one way or another.
Engage with Your Audience
The good thing about social media is that its features are specially made for a more convenient interaction between users. You can use this to your advantage by constantly engaging with your audience.
- Be responsive – responsiveness is one of the most important qualities that you should possess as an entrepreneur. Answering to your fans’ inquiries, reacting to their comments, and giving private updates about their orders are some of the things that you can do. Doing this will give your business, blog, or store a good reputation, and will most probably attract more leads.
- Listen to criticisms –when you upload posts about your products, negative comments cannot be helped. However, you should not view them as mere trolls or irrelevant opinions. You should learn how to listen to their reviews and perspectives in order to provide high-quality services. These negative comments can harm your business but you should use it as a tool to make your store better.
- Address Concerns – addressing concerns can be considered as a subprocess in listening to criticisms. However, doing this will involve research. You don’t have to wait for a dissatisfactory comment before you take action. You can personally talk to your customers who already had access to your product or service, then directly ask for their feedback.
You can also give out surveys online to gather customer responses. Do not end the conversation with feedbacks telling that your product is “okay”.
Ask the right questions like, “Is there something that you think can be improved?”, “Did you have any trouble during the transaction process?”, or “Do you have any suggestions on how we can enhance your experience in our store?”
Enhance Your Content’s Quality
No matter the kind of social media platform that you major in, your content will always be the most important thing that makes people engage.
- Publish original content – publish materials that are rarely written by your competitors. Give information that is very much sought after but seldom given light to. If there is none, however, you can opt to add your own twist or more in-depth information on normal topics.
- Make all posts adhere to quality – in every post, short or long, make sure that your content is of high quality. But how do you tell if a post has good quality?
- Content is based on facts with actual proofs
- The grammar and sentence structure are formulated properly.
- Content is relevant to the products and/or services offered.
Before publishing it to the public, double-check the whole post for possible mistakes, proofread it, and cite all the sources, if there are any.
- Consider Audiences’ Requests – from time to time, you can ask your followers for suggestions. You can ask them if they are looking for a specific product that they want your store to offer or they have specific content requests that they want you to discuss.
If you cannot write high-quality posts, you can always outsource the writing part to a freelancer. If possible, you should not work with writers found in freelancing sites because many of these are amateurs. Instead, look for an affordable content writer who has more than a decade of experience.
Provide Frequent Updates
Your business will need to make changes over time. Updates are necessary to keep up with the changing times, especially so in the social media landscape.
Here are some ideas:
- Website Modifications – additional website features, website redesign, website promotion
- Sales Deals – discounts, price drops, free shipping offers, BOGO offers, promos, giveaways
- Products – new product launching, product relaunching, product modifications, sold out notifications
- Store Announcements – Store hours, day-offs, unavailable service hours, ambassador search
You must also make it a point to send notices if you have changed anything about how your website works, or if there is a change in your pricing. Updates and announcements make your followers feel that they are part of a team—that they are in a group where they belong. As such, they will stay loyal to your group.
Be Open for Collaborations
While you are keeping your current follower’s list, you need to do things to attract new followers and new leads.
You can do this with ads, or you can collaborate with other bloggers or store owners in growing your social media presence and brand.
Here are two important things to think about when collaborating with other brands:
- Relevance –take note of how your product is related to their products or niche. Randomly collaborating with others whose expertise does not revolve around your brand can come off as unnecessary. This can also result in bad marketing. In addition, you are targeting the wrong people, and you cannot build a brand in doing so.
- Number of Followers – you must only collaborate with brands that already have a following. I am not talking about millions, but merely a thousand followers or more. It does not make sense of working with people whose brand only has nine or ten followers.
Once you enter collaborations, you will affect each other’s reputation. Always investigate who your partners are going to be – make sure they are legit.
Summary
Social media may be a free and popular method for building customer engagement, but that does not mean that it is easy to build loyalty.
You need to have a plan, and you have to keep your priorities straight. You need to be active, and most importantly, you need to be deeply involved,
Keep in mind that everything that you do in social media is accessible by the public, so every post and statement that you make has to be thoroughly thought out. The last thing you want is a backlash—the world today has a cancel culture, so be sensitive to what people think.
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