Twitter

Twitter pros: It’s easy! Twitter is one of the easiest networks to grow your following on because it’s easy to find and follow a lot of people, organized by interests, at once. You can also build lots of credibility quickly by sharing good content on your Twitter feed, without much work, by pre-scheduling tweets in a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.

Twitter cons: Not everyone is on Twitter. In fact, depending on your audience, very few of them might be on Twitter.

Share valuable content & format it correctly for Twitter.

Two of the cardinal sins committed by brands on Twitter: only blasting their own content, and not formatting their posts for Twitter’s 140 character count limit.

First: if you make your Twitter account a value-add for your followers (rather than just posting self-serving links to your own blog), you will see your engagement and following grow. Share at least 1 other valuable piece of content that someone else provided for every 1 of yours that you share.

Second: don’t use a tool that allows you to cross-post to Twitter and Facebook without text restrictions. Nobody likes seeing tweets that are incomplete and require clicking over to some other site to finish reading the thought. No one clicks over, and it doesn’t add value to your users to make your content harder to find.

Use a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer if you want to share across multiple social networks, because those will enforce the correct character counts for every network without allowing you to go over. It might take a few extra minutes to shorten your post for Twitter, but the quality is worth getting right.

Get more followers by following people who follow similar accounts to you.

It’s hard to want to tweet when you’ve only got 8 followers and 3 of them are your mom or throwaway accounts you created yourself.

But unless you have a viral sensation that magically boosts your numbers (don’t count on it), if you don’t have many followers on Twitter, you have to go out there and get them. Here’s an easy way to do that:

1. Look for brands similar to yours, and then click on the link in their profile to see their followers. You’ll then see a list of everyone who follows them.

2. Follow those people! (Note: this is easiest to do on the mobile app.) 

Everyone gets an alert when they get a new follower, which means many of the accounts you follow will go check out your page once you follow them. If you have good content, a good picture, and a great bio, they might just decide to follow you since you’re a brand that looks trustworthy and relates to a topic they’re already interested in.

3. If you’re following lots of people, not all of them will follow you back. To avoid racking up an overly high following-to-followers ratio, you can unfollow people who aren’t following you back from time to time, using a tool like ManageFlitter.

The only word of caution here: don’t go nuts following thousands of people a day, because Twitter does have rules and looking like a spammer can get you blocked. We suggest following/unfollowing 1-2x per week at most, especially if your account is brand new.

Instagram

Instagram pros: It’s one of the most popular social networks right now; depending on your audience, it’s very likely that a majority of them use Instagram and may even prefer it over other social networks, which means if you leverage it well, you can get in front of your audience often in their favorite place.

Instagram cons: It’s harder to link to your own content and send traffic to your site, since you can’t just create hyperlinks in the captions you leave on pictures. It can also be hard to come up with good pictures to share if your business isn’t especially photogenic.

Get creative with the images you share.

You don’t just have to post shots of your products; in fact, you shouldn’t. The best Instagram accounts offer something interesting to look at — your brand or product should supplement an engaging photo, rather than being the only point of focus.

Photos of people always do well — psychologically, humans just like looking at faces. Take pictures of your team at work, or document your morning run where you brainstormed great ideas for your next conference.

Write longer captions and use hashtags.

You’ve captured their attention with an interesting photo. Now use the caption to seal the deal!

Your caption content can tie your Instagram share in with your brand. Talk about the context for the photo and connect it to your brand somehow, so that you make sure viewers know the image is yours. And feel free to write a little bit — too much dense text can be hard to process, but writing a couple short paragraphs (1-2 sentences each) can draw people in much more than a too-short 1-2 word caption.

Hashtags are a great way to get discovered by new viewers on Instagram too. Use hashtags that cover a wide range of applicable topics, so the most possible people can find you. For example, if you’re a hair salon in Seattle, you can do #haircut or #salon, but also hashtag Seattle, the neighborhood you’re in, the brand names of products used in the photo… You get the picture. 🙂

Facebook

Facebook pros: Everyone is on Facebook, and for many people it is their primary social network.

Facebook cons: If you’re not showing up in people’s newsfeeds (which is determined by that pesky algorithm), then your posts are basically seen by no one. For brands especially (if you aren’t paying for advertising), it’s a chicken-and-egg problem — to show up in the newsfeed, you need lots of likes and shares, but you can’t get those likes and shares without showing up in the newsfeed. Facebook prefers to fill their users’ newsfeeds with people over brands, unless those brands are paying Facebook for ads to put them in the newsfeed.

Use images whenever possible.

The most popular, liked, and shared Facebook posts tend to have images with them. If you share an article from another site (which you should do — always be adding value beyond boosting your own brand), make sure it has an image before sharing it on Facebook. Without an image, your post will be hard to see and is likely to be ignored.

You can also post your own images; this is a great way to get extra mileage out of your Instagram posts, actually.

When you’re posting on Instagram, connect your Facebook profile to your Instagram account and post in both locations at once. Your entire caption will show up, as well as your hashtags, to help you engage your current audience and also reach new people — at the same time, on two different networks. Boom!

Engage your audience and start a conversation.

If you have the time and interest in investing in Facebook (which you maybe should, depending on the audience — some audiences spend all gosh darn day on Facebook), you can get the even more engagement with your brand by starting a conversation with your followers.

Facebook is huge for conversations and debates, so take advantage of those elements of the platform. Run contests, ask people for their opinions, or solicit stories from your followers. If you’ve got a lively audience (or plan to grow one), this is a great use of your time since you’ll be able to form a direct connection and build a relationship with individual customers.

Google+

Google+ pros: When you link to your own content on Google+, it adds to the SEO value of those links and helps you rank higher in Google results.

Google+ cons: No one uses it.

Share your links on Google+, but don’t invest too much extra time.

As we said above, sharing links on Google+ gives them extra SEO power and helps them appear higher in Google search results. Google likes things that have been shared on Google+. The better the SEO value of your blog posts, the more website traffic you’ll see, so it can be worth taking a moment to share the posts on G+.

However, don’t invest time in trying to get followers or sharing other great content on Google+. No one uses it, and you just won’t see much positive ROI for your efforts.

Ready to take your social game to the next level? Get going!

Or if you’d rather have us tackle it for you — well, we’d be happy to! We offer a number of marketing services now, including social media and email newsletters, so you can spend your time on your business while we help you broaden your reach online.

Just contact our team at [email protected] or Start A Project!