The tricks of broadening your reach over social media for free!

Sometimes, when businesses have set up their social media accounts, they ask us ‘what happens now?’.  After setting up your account, making it look good and posting some updates, you need to increase your followers and how many people see your posts so that your company is having the reach it deserves.  This post will look at the different ways of doing this, and by putting all these tips together as part of your social media strategy you will see an increase in the number of people hearing about your company.

1.       Friends and family

When you have recently set up a page, a great way to get your initial followers is by asking friends and family to follow your pages, interact with them and share your updates.  By doing any of these things, others will see the interaction they have had with you, increasing your reach immediately.

2.       Call to action

When you post a status update from your social media pages, there is a much higher percentage that followers will interact with it if you ask them to.  So next time you post an update, ask people to share it, like it and leave a comment.

3.       Look for new connections

You can’t just be on social media and expect people to come to your page, follow you and use your services without doing any work yourself.  You need to be looking in to the social media space and connecting with people of interest to you.  It could be local groups, potential suppliers, potential customers, industry associations etc.  When you connect with these people, your name is on their radar, and if they follow you back, even better, as they will then see your company posts.

4.       Join discussions

This point also requires a bit of effort on your part – find conversations and join them.  If you don’t have much time on your hands, set aside just 15 minutes a week to find a discussion and contribute to it, or post something new in a LinkedIn group.  By contributing to discussions on a regular basis, people start to recognise your name.  If people are looking for a product or service, they are more likely to buy from a company whose name they know than another random company.

5.       Employees

Make it part of your employees’ day to use social media for the company.  It will be worth a few minutes of their time everyday to join in discussions/start conversations/connect with new people/search for potential clients through their own personal social media accounts.  Having employees of a business promoting their company through their personal pages says a lot to the outside person, and it also gives you a larger reach than you would have just posting from your personal page or the company page.

Marketme

Marketme is a leading small business to small business news, marketing advice and product review website. Supporting business across the UK with sponsored article submissions and promotions to a community of over 50,000 on Twitter.