Author: BSM Creative Productions | Aug 26, 2021 | 

Everyone is on social media nowadays and it is your most vital resource for growing your brand, if you can connect with your audience and beat out the thousands of other influencers on social media trying to reach the very same audience as you.

In order to be effective on social media you need to find ways to separate yourself from the crowd. You can also utilize a few tricks to make your strategies more effective so you can become a self-promoting expert in no time.

Understand Your Brand

Before you can properly promote yourself, you need a solid understanding on what you are promoting. You need to ask yourself reflective questions to understand your purpose and really lock in your brand strategy.

• Do you have a mission statement?
• What is your purpose?
• What are you promoting?
• What image do you want to promote?
• Do you have a color palate or an overall mood you want to project in your videos and photos?

Know Your Target Audience

This is second but equally important to your brand strategy. In order to grow a following and draw in the right readers you need to know who you are targeting. For example, is your target base the Gen-Y crowd? Are you targeting an older crowd?

These are things you’ll need to consider when creating your brand and growing your social media channels. If you don’t understand your target audience and appeal to them directly, your social media campaigns are unlikely to be effective.

Use The Right Hashtags

Social media is all about hashtags but that doesn’t mean you should spam your posts with hundreds of hashtags because they will just detour people from following you. An effectively used hashtag will gain you exposure in the right areas and bring you more followers.

There are platforms that can help you select the best hashtags for your posts but they often cost money. You can avoid these by looking at other social media platforms in your niche to see which hashtags are being used.

On Instagram when selecting hashtags, you can see how many posts are currently under that hashtag. Try to choose hashtags that aren’t over saturated, think 10,000 posts versus 3 million.

Host Giveaways

Giveaways are increasingly popular on social media for a number of reasons. Firstly, everyone loves free stuff. I know I do. You can do a giveaway or contest without just about anything and the motivation behind it an vary.

You can create your own hashtag and have others post with your hashtag to gain popularity. Host a giveaway with a popular prize, like an Amazon GC, and require people share your posts for an entry.

Know The Power Of Video

Statistically, internet users engage three times as much with videos than they do with simple posts or photos. Videos are engaging and entertaining and they draw users in. Promotional videos lead to a much higher conversion rate when it comes to purchases and the convenient share feature on platforms like YouTube gives people who enjoy your video the option to share it instantly to their page. This allows others to promote you themselves, saving you the work.

Since smartphones became accessible to almost everyone in the world, videos have become an integral part of everyones day. Not everyone loves to read but almost everyone enjoys watching an entertaining video. By adding engaging videos to your social media platforms, you are appealing to the masses.

Follow The Right People

The best way to promote yourself? Promote yourself to the right people. The saying it’s all about who you know still proves to be true in most situations. Find popular influencers or micro-influencers that are in line with your brand strategy or even your niche and follow them.

Interact with their posts, comment on things that appeal to you and your readers and even consider sharing their content on your page. This gives you more exposure and increases your chances of getting more users if any of the influencers decide to follow you back.

Go Live

This has become an increasingly popular trend and thats for a big reason. It’s effective. We’ve discussed the effectiveness of promotional videos before and the same is true for live videos.

Every industry from clothing boutiques to gaming enterprises use the live features available on most social media platforms to answer questions in real time and showcase their products or expertise. Readers love this feature because it makes them feel connected and acknowledged, especially when you respond to them in real time.

Link It

Including links back to yourself on your social media platforms is the most effective way to promote yourself appropriately. When blogging, the rule of thumb is to include at least three internal links back to your own content to keep readers on your website for longer, this applies to social media as well.

When applicable, you’ll want to link to your webpage or even other social media channels to continuing to draw people back in to your content.

Be Personal

The reason influencers are so popular and have so much influence is because they give their users a glimpse into their personal life and that gives their posts and recommendations a touch of true honesty and realism.

While you don’t want to be too personal on you professional social media feeds you do want to let your individual personality shine through so you have a sincere and authentic message being passed on to your followers.

You’ll gain more of an audience by showing some of yourself and including your personality, quirks and all, into your brand and social media strategy.

Don’t Over Post

Your posts need time to grow organically and if you are posting too often, this won’t happen. Rather the opposite will happen. Each new post will bump older content, shielding the older posts from your viewers which won’t give it enough time to ‘organically ripen’ so to speak.

Limit blog and FB posts to once per day, you can use Twitter and Instagram more often, but you still want to avoid overdoing it.

Analyze and Adjust Accordingly

Every social media platform has analytics so you can see a breakdown of whats been effective and what hasn’t. You can see what users are reacting to, what your click-thru rate is, and if you use sponsored posts you can see the difference between organic and paid content and what is producing results.

This is a vital tool when it comes to growing your social media feeds so you’d be amiss to skip this tool. Analyze your feeds and adjust when something is working. In time you’ll see how to promote yourself effectively and you’ll watch your social media feeds grow in size.