7 Top Tips to Grow Your Social Media Following

Ian Bass

Last Updated: February 6, 2023

In this article, we will list 7 key tips to consider when starting to grow your social following, which we believe will help fast-track you towards building your authority and avoiding the common pitfalls.

7 Ways To Grow Your Social Media Following | OptimizePress

When starting a new online business, one of the most common types of advice you will hear people mention is that you must  “Start building a list of subscribers.” Building a list of subscribers/customers is perhaps the most valuable business asset you can develop.

Top Tip

It's not just about building a list, it's more about building a list that is engaging and responsive. A smaller list of subscribers that responds to your marketing is more valuable than a large inactive list.

The key challenge to building a list if you're new to your niche is that many of your prospects will not know who you are. It takes time to build authority and become a person of influence in your market. To get yourself established, you're going to need to put in the ground work and “be seen everywhere” and “go where your audience is”. Join the conversation.

Having a strong social presence is key and one that many industry professionals have advocated more and more as social media has popularised in the last 5-6 years.

As Gary Vaynerchuk shares in his book - Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook...

“It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.”

Social media audiences are huge and growing.

The challenge then is, “How do you use social media to build an audience?”

In this blog post, we will list 7 key tips to consider when starting to grow your social following, which we believe will help fast-track you towards building your authority and avoiding the common pitfalls.

7 Top Tips For Building Your Social Media Following

1: Understand Your Audience

Before you venture out to build a social media following the size of Tony Robbins, you need to have a clear idea of who your target audience is and what message you want to portray online. This is vital! You need to understand what your business online social persona is and what type of content style will resonate with your audience.

If you think of it in terms of building a house. You wouldn't start building the house without a plan, first of all, you have an architect draw up plans!

The same applies to your social media strategy, dedicate time to thinking about how you want to portray your business and who are the people that you're trying to appeal to?

There needs to be a connection. Don't project the image of a global powerhouse if you're a solopreneur working from your home office. In the same way, it makes no sense to try to appeal to men in their twenties if your audience is women in their fifties.

One of your main aims is to build a connection with your following and to do that they need to see you as someone that resonates with them and their goals, someone to trust, listen to and follow. If you don't work on building a connection, then the opposite will happen and you will build a disconnection. Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you what the result of that will be!

For a great example of building a connection and pitching your social media perfectly for your audience, I recommend you check out a very close friend of OptimizePress - Kerwin Rae. He is achieving great results on social media by being himself and providing value that the marketplace is looking for.

Top Tip

The connection is between what you offer as a business and what your audience needs as a solution!

2: Target The Social Media Channel That Resonates With You And Your Audience

You need to hang out where your audience is, so identifying the correct social network is a good strategy. Being across all of the social media channels is a full-time job, so my advice is to target the social media platform that resonates most with you and mirrors your skill set.

For example, if you're great on video and have a younger audience demographic, you might be more suited to Snapchat.

Top Tip

Social media can be overwhelming, lots of various platforms with different ways of interacting. The key is to focus on the channels which you think you can be most effective in and focus on that.

With over 1 billion active users, Facebook has become a powerhouse in the social media world, with people from all over the globe actively using it. Facebook is probably the first network that comes to mind, but there are many other social networks where you can create a presence - Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram etc...

With many popular social media channels available today, you can be confident that many of your prospects and customers will likely hang out on some of them. No matter how big or small the size of your market is, there will likely be pages and groups available that you can join and get involved in, which we will cover shortly.

Of course, not all of your potential customers will have active Facebook accounts and may likely prefer to use alternatives such as Twitter, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn or Snapchat. Share some updates of your business activities to start getting a feel for how the social platforms can work in your business.

3: Post Shareable Content

People use social media to be social, post pictures of their dinner and spy on their friends, so the last thing they're interested in is you promoting your product. You wouldn't just enter into a conversation in a coffee shop and pitch your new ebook, so there is no reason why you should act like that online.

It's all about the share, not the sale!

You should limit social activity to relationship building and nurture value with people. The real key to social media success is to post content that is so valuable and beneficial for people that they want to share it. One of the fundamental principles for this is to talk to people online like you would if you were face to face with them.

Top Tip

Find a picture of someone that fits with your customer demographic and keep it around your computer. This might seem a little Norman Bates from the movie Psycho, but visualizing a customer when posting on social media can help you vision a real conversation and how you would act!

With your social media profiles in place, you should now start posting useful and valuable content, which will allow your prospects to gain value and hopefully begin getting yourself known. Knowing what’s valuable for your customer can be a challenge at first and may require trialling different content in order to test which content types develop the most engagement. This is great for identifying exactly what your customer is most interested in, which can lead to future potential products and solutions.

Most social media platforms can you give you analytics on engagement and reach of your content.

You can also use a great tool like ‘BuzzSumo’ to help you investigate the most popular and shared content in your market, which will allow you to model and create your own content on a similar topic. Your goal is to add as much value as possible for your audience in order to build trust, authority and eventually be seen as an expert in your niche.

4: Identify Key Influencers And Engage With Your Audience

Identify the key influencers in your niche and what social media networks they use most frequently. You can then begin actively engaging with the influencers and their audience.

Success Leaves Clues...

This is great for developing knowledge and insight on the most common topics, which will allow you to further strategise your content pieces so that you better target towards those key topics. Every niche will have their individual pains and challenges, and it's up to you to identify what these are and to devise a creative solution that will help solve it.

In short, the business which is able to best connect with their audience wins.

5: Interact With Everyone Who Mentions You - Treat People Like People

When it comes to social media, manners matter! It’s important that you’re constantly engaging with people and replying to those who mention you on social media. This allows your audience to know that you’re active, responsive and listening to their challenges.

Since many businesses use poor social media strategies or dedicate little resources to keeping on top of their social media, if you can be pro-active you can find yourself at a huge advantage.

Being active, approachable and providing great value can mean you quickly differentiate yourself from your competition and build your authority.

“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.” - Seth Godin

As your social media presence grows, it will eventually become more time-consuming to manage. Using a tool like Hootsuite or Mention will allow you to view all of your social media accounts all in one place under one single dashboard.

6: Participate In The Conversation.

Facebook groups are quite possibly one of the most useful places you can spend your time as a business owner, as they allow you to directly connect with your potential customers and join in on the conversation around your niche. As your time spent on these platforms grow, your understanding of your niche will eventually improve and you will know exactly what content to offer your customers.

At the same time, your contribution to the Facebook groups will help to start to establish you as an authority figure.

Spend some time looking through some common threads, ask questions and don’t be afraid to offer solutions. Other users will appreciate it and you may start to build close relationships with them, further building authority and recognition in your marketplace.

7: Promote Your Social Platforms.

You have many channels open to you that offer opportunities to grow your social media following. Make sure you have added links to your social media in the following places:

  • Email signatures
  • Blog posts
  • Web pages
  • Membership areas
  • Forum signatures
  • Video sign-offs
choose your image

When adding social media icons/links to these places always maintain sophistication by including them sparingly.  A site full of social media icons and "follow me" banners will overwhelm people and affect your conversion rates.

Top Tip

When deciding whether or not to add social media links to your landing pages, it's always best to check the effect this might have on your conversion rates. A landing page should have a clear call to action and distractions for social media channels might have a negative effect.

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    32 replies to "7 Ways to Grow Your Social Media Following"

    • Abiodun Babalola

      To be candid I have abandoned OP for sometime including cancellation of my Clubhouse membership. I was happy when I saw the update but I worked on it today on one of my sites to still discover that one the reasons I abandoned it in the first place still unresolved. I installed fresh wordpress and OP platform on it including pioneer event template but can still do live update. It disappears as soon as I save the edit. Any help

    • Matthew Iacopelli

      One thing I wish you could control in the new PlusPack was the speed of animations of elements. I have played around with this on my website and some of the animations are too fast making them in my opinion more distracting than helpful.

      • Matthew Iacopelli

        You also need to add Pinterest to the Social Media Networking

        • Ian Bass

          Hi Matthew, Thank you for your feedback, you make some good points that I will discuss with our dev team.

    • Workout Anywhere

      I know this if off topic, but what do you guys use for quick little “gif” tutorials on your OP2 pages and blog pages? I keep having trouble with this and feel this would be helpful for my members.

    • Lee

      Love the article! Great content… and I have 3 wishes. 🙂

      # 1 – I’d like to see OptimizeMember allow memberships that aren’t just based upon each level giving access to everything below it… plus the new level.

      I have paid paid clients, affiliates & sometimes both… so my levels are basically:
      Level 0 = Free Subscriber = access to site & blog
      Level 1 = Paid Client = access to site, blog + Members Area
      Level 2 = Affiliate – access to site, blog + Affiliate Dashboard
      Level 3 = Client + Affiliate = access to all

      With that being said, the above levels are my desire. In reality, the first 2 levels (0 & 1) work fine. But Level 2 wants to also give my affiliates access to the Members Area that should only be for Paid Clients. But, not all affiliates buy your products. The same thing goes for Paid Clients, because they don’t always want to be affiliates either.

      So, please… please… make OptimizeMember let us block the pages that each level should NOT have access to. Thanks!
      ————–
      #2 – It would be awesome if OP3 allowed us to utilize JavaScript inside our pages, without having to use other plugins like Global Content Blocks.
      ————–
      #3 – It would be amazing if OP3 also included a really robust OptimizeAffiliates system, that played nicely with OP… similar to an all-inclusive version of AffiliateWP. It’s a really cool product, but it has way too many plugins… that slow site load times & increase the likelihood of OP conflicts.

      • David Frosdick

        Hi Lee, thanks for your input.

        Have you tested using ‘packages’ within OPM. You can restrict access to pages that way. This would stop affiliate accessing the member area.

        If you have any more great suggestion please use our feature request site here https://www.optimizesupport.com

        You can share and vote on features.

    • Douglas Idugboe

      Glad to see you guys have ditched complacency and finally back on the saddle again.

      You showed the industry what was possible and you stood by the way side and watched wannabes pass you by. The attitude became that of maintenance instead of continuous innovations. This attitude has now lead into playing catchup.

      When ever my licence came up for renewal, I always asked myself, “What for?” Until last week when it became worth it again to renew my licence due to recent improvements via the PlusPack.

      OP2 still has a lot going for it and I hope this new attitude to the software would make it great again. Keep innovating. That was how you became the primal software in the industry and that’s how you can regain your leadership position again.

      Keep the improvements coming.

      • Ian Bass

        Hi Douglas,

        Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate you taking the time.

        I always like to be honest and open myself, so I think there is some accuracy within your comments.

        Although, it might look like complacency on the outside, I can ensure you that on the inside we have been investing heavily in the future and working incredibly hard on new features, themes, plugins and brand new products.

        What you are seeing now with the release of the PlusPack is just the start of an exciting journey of new developments built to help you and the OptimizePress community achieve their online goals.

        We are not just focussing on new features and products, we also want to build a stronger community where we can help each other progress, this includes new OptimizePress groups, training and educational resources.

        As an example, we have just launched our new feature requests site where you can submit feature ideas that you would like to see us build:

        https://www.optimizesupport.com

        Exciting times ahead…

        Ian

      • Katherine M. Logan

        I have the publisher license, and the clubhouse membership that I got when I originally got OptimizePress 2.0. Will I be able to download and use the OptimizePress 3.0 with the club membership or will I have to buy a new license? Anyone know?

        • KM Lee

          There’s no OP 3.0 yet. I think you’re referring to the PlusPack add-on? If you’ve an active Publisher license, you’ll have access to the PlusPack in the members’ area.

          • Katherine M. Logan

            No, I have the Plus Pack, and it seems to be working fine, I meant OptimizePress 3.0, once it comes out. Hope this is clearer. : ) Have a great day and happy holidays !

    • Walied Ibrahim

      Hi Ian

      I’m struggling to use the most common robust ecommerce plugin, WooCommerce, in my website easily with OptimizePress. I see that OP itself is using WooCommerce at their checkout page and I submitted so many tickets and couldn’t get a real support on that. I appreciate if you can help me know how to build a checkout page with LiveEditor and make it working with WooCommerce.

      • Kelsey

        Hey Walied,

        Let me save you countless hours of frustration and fruitless scouring of forums for an answer to this question… Optimizepress and Woocommerce do not work together. You will find resources saying just download this plugin or that to make it work but it will never work properly so don’t even try. I’ve been waiting for a seamless integration for 3 years but it has never happened so I moved on to Shopify. The only thing that ever worked for me to make Optimizepress an ecommerce site was to use Ecwid which unfortunately has lots of limitations as well.

        Hope this helps and good luck!

        • Ian Bass

          Walied and Kelsey, the new OptimizePress theme we are releasing in the coming weeks has some built in WooCommerce integration.

          We also have a new plugin in final development that will allow you to integrate woocommerce and optimizemember to sell access to your memberships through woocommerce.

          • elastic

            What do you recommend: wooCommerce or Shopify for integrating with OP?
            I know WC is free, but $29 for Shopify is OK for me if it’s better or more professional. Thanks 🙂

            • David Frosdick

              Right now we don’t have plans for Shopify to integrate unless people start requesting it

              Having used both cart platforms and regularly and continue to I would say use Shopify if you are not technical and want the main shop features. If you want a free simple payment cart then go with Woo.

              Both are great but knowing what you need would help answer which is best.

    • Mikela Porras

      But how you can change the color accordingly like shown on Gary´s page?

      • Ian Bass

        Mikela… You can customise the current element styles to any colour you want but there currently isn’t a style exactly the same as the example on Gary’s site.

        However our dev team are working on a very similar style that will be added to the platform in the coming weeks.

        🙂

        • Mikela Porras

          Thanks for the info. I´m happy so far with the new plus pack

    • mandewhite

      It doesn’t look like I have this “PlusPack Version” thing you speak of…how do I get it?

      • David Frosdick

        The PlusPack has been rolled out to Publisher and Pro customers. We emailed everyone a few weeks ago and again to reminded everyone to upgrade.

        As of now we are making a few small changes and then it be released to everyone again 🙂

    • Jason Spencer

      So… No love for Core members. 🙁

      • Ian Bass

        Hey Jason, thank you for taking the time to join the conversation. We have plenty of love for every member of our community.

        I’m pleased to let you know we have some new updates coming to the Core platform real soon, including a brand new theme.

    • Workout Anywhere

      Rock on! We can always use more help with this!

      • Workout Anywhere

        Does this work on blog posts?

        • KM Lee

          just tested. you can add the element into your blog post.

          btw, for Blog Posts, when I try to click on the ‘Color Box’, the pop-up window for the color selection doesn’t appear. I’ve to manually enter the hex code. for LiveEditor pages, it works fine.

          • Ian Bass

            KM, Thanks for reporting the issue, I have confirmed it as well and reported it to the development team.

    • KM Lee

      Ian, the president is finally BACK and on fire! excited to see you guys are starting to enhance the OptimizePress platform. making high-converting websites is going to be GREAT again in 2017!

      • Ian Bass

        KM, very topical pun with the “GREAT again”… 🙂

    • Vic Dorfman

      Looks awesome. Good to see you guys aren’t getting complacent on improving the OP platform. This is why I’m such a big OP fan!

      • Ian Bass

        Thank you Vic… More updates to be released in the coming weeks.

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