How To Grow An Engaged Following On Social Media

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTBuying followers doesn’t benefit anyone, as they’re not going to be the type of people you want to follow you. They won’t engage and they definitely won’t be your target audience.Having 500 followers that love your content is much more valuable than having 5,000 followers that do not engage. A slow, organic growth is what you should be aiming for.Follow-unfollow tactics are not the best approach when it comes to gaining followers.Tell people you are on each platform, directing them to come and follow you. Put it in your newsletter, put it in your email signature, put it in your blog posts. The more you tell people, the more chances you have of people following you.Facebook is a difficult platform to grow as there is not a lot of one-to-one interaction. One of the easiest things you can do to grow your followers is pay for PPC advertising. If you’re just starting out, you can create a ‘like campaign’ to gain page likes.Knowing where you customers are will help you go and like the pages that your target audiences are already interacting with. If you go on Facebook on your desktop, you should be able to find a button on the righthand side that says ‘See Page’s Feed’. If you click on this, any page that your page likes will show up here. Once you’re on this page, you can like and comment as your page.When it comes to Instagram and Twitter, again you need to think about where your target audience are going to be. Create a list of where they’ll likely be spending their and then follow all of them immediately. Once you have started following these pages you can start to interact with pages your target audience will be using.Think about the hashtags your customers are using. Using the hashtags you know your customers will be using, you can go and follow and interact with people you may want to follow you. Don’t use it as an opportunity to sell.When you’re interacting with posts, make sure you’re using more than 3 words and writing something that is relevant to the photo. If not, you may come across as though you’re using a social media comment bot.Rather than following the people that are following your competitors, follow the people that are interacting with them.Remember, it’s quality of quantity.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Growing a social media following is no longer an easy task and it takes a lot of work to gain followers that are engaged. Whilst it may have been easy in the past, social media has changed and people use it in a completely different way to when it first started out. Those people that have a high number of followers, may have been doing it for YEARS before they saw success.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSA Couple of Caveats – 08:32General Tips for Growing Followers on Social Media – 15:30Gaining Followers on Facebook – 20:00Growing Your Following On Instagram And Twitter – 27:32LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODELive Masterclass Sign UpTranscript below Speaker 1: (00:32) Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. And as always I'm your host Teresa Heath-Wareing. This week I am coming to you live from Nashville in the United States. I am really pleased to be over here doing a bit of work but also visiting a very dear friend of mine who's going to be featuring on the podcast soon. And it's so nice to have a bit of time out and relax and be in a different space. So we're trying to desperately juggle work and also enjoying ourselves a little bit. So, funnily enough, I've just been down Broadway. I think I said that right, which is where all the bars and all the music is. And we had one gin and tonic and I was like, okay, if I'm gonna record a podcast today, we need to stop drinking right now and I need to head back and let's do this podcast and then maybe we can go back out again.Speaker 1: (01:22) So we're trying to juggle both, which is always a bit tricky, but it's definitely, definitely worth doing and being able to have a trip somewhere. Now I wanted to mention something. If you're not on my email list, I want you to get yourself over to teresaheathwareing.com and make sure you sign up to my newsletter because something happened on this trip, which I wrote about in last week's email. So every Wednesday I write you an email and it's always different content and it's always things that you can't normally find anywhere else. But last week we had such an interesting story because something happened. So I'm really quickly going to relive it here with you. So basically we had got this trip planned for quite some time and I had planned to write my Wednesday email while I was at the airport. While I was sat in the first class lounge and I was going to be talking about manifestation and how I felt that using manifestation, I had managed to organise this trip where I could fly first class, which was always on my list. It's on my goals, it's on my vision board. And I was so excited to tell you the least. Like honestly, I was really excited that we're going to fly first class, never done it before, managed to do it on point. So obviously didn't have to spend the amount of money that you'd normally have to spend, but literally I'd visualised every single step of going first class. So arriving at Heathrow airport, going through the first class check-in, going and sitting in the first class lines, what it'd be like to be welcomed onto the plane and turn left and you get the picture. So anyway, we get to the airport and bearing in mind I've been to the states a lot. We've probably come here four-ish times a year and I got to the airport and we go to the check in.Speaker 1: (03:05) I'm all very excited because it's first class and the lady says to me out, are you travelling on ESTAs or Visas? And I very confidently, because I've travelled to the states loads, we fly on ESTAs. So ESTA is a type of visa and you have to have one if you're from the UK to get into the states. And she looked again and she was like, oh, we just don't have one on file for you. And I was thinking, what do you mean? Like I literally flew back in March and it's valid and it's all fine. And then I remembered I had actually changed my passport because my married name is different to the name I use for business and I wanted to get my passport and obviously my official name and I changed my passport and then hadn't updated my ESTA. And it hadn't even occurred to me that I had to update it or change it.Speaker 1: (03:53) And honestly this sudden realisation and horrendousness came over me where I had the biggest knot in my stomach. I thought I was going to cry. I thought it was gonna be sick because basically when you apply for an ESTA it can take 72 hours. So even if I applied there and then there was a fair chance I wasn't getting on that flight, this first class flight that I dreamed of and felt like I had worked my way to manifesting wasn't going to happen. And I literally had a couple of options: full time break down, cry, be like a complete, you know, slightly babyish and lose my mind over it or breathe deep, realise that I can't control that situation and all I can do is what I can do. So basically my husband and I went and sat down in the first class checking in bed cause we weren't even allowed through.Speaker 1: (04:50) Like you're not even allowed into the lounge. We filled in the application. Honestly it felt like the longest half an hour of my life trying to fill this in. Everything just felt hard and difficult and, but I was trying really hard to be calm and breathe and then we filled in and the lady came back over and was like, have you gone? And we were like, we filled it in and it's just a case of waiting. And that's where I took on all the learnings I've used over the past 12-18 months about being calm and breathing and realising that the only thing I can have any effect on in that situation is me and how I manage myself. So anyway, we sat there for a bit and my husband went off to the bathroom and a bit of a wandering cause basically, there was nothing we could do. And I'm sat there every two minutes checking my application and I looked down and it said approved.Speaker 1: (05:41) And honestly, I don't even think it was half an hour until they approved it, which was amazing. And I went over the woman at the desk so excited, like, oh my God, look,...