Guest article by Alain Cote of Expression Web Solutions.
No matter what your end goals are for your social media strategy, chances are ones of your intermediate goals is to build (or increase) your followers base.
There are 2 main ‘methods’ of getting new followers: organic or paid.
Organic Reach
“Organic reach” refers to what most people think of when they think about getting new followers: you add an interesting post to your page…then a new person happens to land on that post (probably through another person they are following)…then they decide to follow you.
Advantage of this method: it’s cheap (it does not really cost anything). Disadvantage: it’s very slow to build a following. Even if you post really great content, it can take a long time to build a descent size following.
Paid Reach
As the name would imply, Paid Reach is acquired by paying Facebook or Twitter to help you get followers. Both platforms make it pretty simple for you to ‘advertise’ your presence. Depending on your budget FB and Twitter will tell you how many new Likes or Followers you can expect to get. For example, on a recent Facebook campaign Expression ran, we got about 60 new followers for a $40 budget. That’s about $0.70 per follower. Considering that these new followers will probably view all our posts for the next foreseeable future, I consider this a pretty good investment.
If you’re not sure where to get started for advertising on Facebook, see the screen-shot below, and follow the instructions. The system lets you target your audience by geography, interests, and all kinds of different metrics. This allows you to be very precise about the people you will reach.
Advertising on Twitter is also very simple. See the image bellow to access the ad page. Twitter also lets you target your audience.
The Mixed-Method
The most powerful approach you can use is to employ both methods simultaneously. By posting great content and devoting a small budget (even under $90 per month), you can build a large following pretty fast. Using this approach, Expression was able to get hundreds of new followers ever month for several months
Shameless plug: if you prefer having experts take care of your social media strategy and efforts instead of trying to do it yourself, Expression offers social media marketing services at very reasonable costs. End of shameless plug.
Follow your strategy
Remember back in our 1st post, we determined that establishing your social media goals and strategy was the most important part of your social media efforts? This is still true. The methods above are strictly ways to fast-track your audience build. If you’re a great poster, but have little to no budget, then you will eventually reach your goals…it may just take a little while longer. If you are not that great at posting, but have some budget, you can build an audience pretty quickly (but beware that without great posts, people might ‘unfollow’ you…which means you wasted your money). Being a great poster and having a small budget is the winning combo and will build your audience in no time.
Learn more about social media and great website design for non-profits at Expression Web Solutions.
