Dear Social Advisors,
I want to build a following for my Facebook and Twitter followers. I know several people who buy fake likes and followers just to get their numbers up, but I’m looking for more than numbers. I want to connect my community. Do you have any suggestions for increasing my audience?
Anita M. Ormond Beach, FL
Anita, it’s AWESOME you’ve decided that fake friends aren’t for you. Get started by making REAL connections instead with a few simple steps.
Start Simple. Connect with people you already know. If you’ve already gone through the signup process for Facebook or Twitter, you’ve been prompted to search for contacts using email addresses. Building your follower base is a great way to get likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter, and using known contacts is an easy tool to achieve this. On Facebook, use your personal profile to look at your business page and you’ll see an option to invite your friends to like your page. You can also use tips from our blog to invite people who have liked your content to like your page
On Facebook and Twitter, you can enter the email addresses of family members, friends, co-workers, colleagues in the industry, and former and current clients. These social media platforms will search for profiles registered with those emails, allow you to connect with them and help you create an instantaneous following that will like, share, and retweet your posts (IF you give them good content).
Add Buttons and Widgets Your business site or blog is a great tool for shifting customers from your professional website to your social profile, where they can like your content, follow your Twitter feed, and share your updates with others. Facebook and Twitter offer widgets that bloggers and website owners can use that allow visitors to easily click-to-share information on their social media profiles, making it easy to show off your content on social media.
Diversify Your Information What does this mean? Get creative with your posts! Don’t post the same type of content time and again on your professional site or blog. Offer your visitors unique and varying information that inspires them to share your information and encourages them to routinely visit your site in search of the next web gem you have to share. There’s no cookie-cutter schedule for what should be produced and when, so use analytics and common sense to figure out your routime. Vary your posts by including short posts with inspirational quotes or videos, as well as longer content that offers how-to advice and industry-specific content.
Polls, Questions, & Quizzes The best thing you can do to generate interest, increase your likes, and gain more followers, is to encourage people to interact with your profile and your brand. When you share polls, pose questions to your visitors, or challenge their knowledge with quizzes, you encourage participation. Those who enjoy your polls, questions, and quizzes are highly likely to share them on their Facebook profiles and retweet them on Twitter.
Learn from the Best If you don’t know how to do it, don’t be afraid or intimidated! Follow people who DO know what works best in your niche. Learn from them, and you’ll start building a greater follower base, increasing likes, and boosting your audience in no time! You shouldn’t carbon copy their approach, but analyzing what works for their accounts will help you develop an adapted approach that will work for you.
There are a lot of ways to boost your Facebook and Twitter activity and following, but these are some of the best organic methods that allow you to achieve those goals without spending too much time, because your time is your money!
In my opinion, the easiest way to increase views and likes on your Facebook page is to post as much content as possible, especially videos. I have been running my video blog on Facebook for a long time, but recently, in order to upload videos to Facebook, they often need to be compressed, since the video size does not allow uploading. Most likely you will have this problem from the very beginning, so here you can learn how to compress videos for facebook. I think this should help you initially.