Social media secrets, part 2/4: Growing the audience
In our second post in this series, we’ll look at how large your follower base should be and how to make it grow.
These findings come from what we’ve learned by analysing 1.9 million tweets and 1.3 million Facebook updates from more than 4,300 brands listed on Underhood since July 2016
Earlier post: Social media secrets, part 1/4: Measure against others.
Focus on Facebook
When starting out on social media — or finally putting real effort into it — you have to choose which channels to focus on. You can’t be present on all channels, so select those where your audience is most likely to be.
For most brands, Facebook is the most effective channel
For most brands, Facebook is the most effective channel. It has two billion monthly users, and on average those users spend more time on the service than on other social networks (excluding YouTube). According to the Pew Research Center, 79% of American internet users (68% of all U.S. adults) use Facebook. The same goes for the rest of the world.
Every now and then, there is talk of Facebook dying. For example, in 2014 Princeton researchers said that “Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017”.
For a patient with a terminal condition, the big blue network is doing pretty well. A few days ago the BBC published a piece entitled “Disruption is over — and Facebook won”.
It is true that the youngest social media users are not keen on Facebook, but if you want to reach the masses, not only the teens, we recommend putting effort into your presence on the world’s biggest social network.
What is a good audience size?
Facebook is a platform where small and medium-sized businesses can thrive: 80% of the brands in the Underhood database have fewer than 10,000 Facebook followers.
The median number of Facebook followers is 2,600, and the median number of Twitter followers is 2,000. If your audience is much smaller than this, you risk wasting your social media budget. But note that the number of median followers on Facebook varies greatly by industry: for Consulting, for example, it is 755, whereas for News it is 51,181.
Your audience is too small, always
It is okay for a niche product to have a small and committed community (our measurement method acknowledges this; see the normalising logic of our algorithms), but if your audience is too small, you will not reach enough people to make your voice heard.
So, our first tip to businesses that want to stand out on social: grow your audience!
The usual reason for waste of money is minimal social media audiences
There is no point in talking to only a handful of people. Too often, companies spend huge budgets on video productions or other expensive operations, only to be disappointed by the results. And the usual reason for this waste of money is minimal social media audiences. This failing is easy to fix with a relatively small budget.
Practical tips for growing your audience
There is no short cut to becoming a social star. You have to be consistent, which means posting a lot, and the content must be engaging. You should also be responsive to your audience, you need to care.
Post a lot. Engage. Be responsive.
Make noise about our accounts
No one will find your social media accounts if they are not promoted on your site, and on other social channels, in your email signatures, newsletters, business cards, and other materials relating to your brand. Your webpage’s footer should include your social accounts, and you should have links to them on your About Us and Contact pages.
Don’t promote. Discuss and reshare.
Give credit to others. Share and comment on good stuff from your clients, competitors, or anybody else. By being nice, you are more likely to be followed and to get shares yourself.
Hold giveaways and contests
Hold contests, and make liking your Facebook page or following your Twitter account a condition of entry. Give stuff away. This might all feel a bit cheap, but our meters don’t lie: contests get huge amounts of engagement.
We will focus on what to post in part 3 of this blog series.
People follow brands that their friends like
A good way to grow your Facebook audience is to invite people to whom you are personally connected to follow your page.
After attracting your first fans, we recommend using sponsored updates. (Click on the “Boost post” button on your post and target to “People who like your Page and their friends”. After people react, you can invite them to like your page.)
Why does targeting to “people who like your page and their friends” work? When a potential follower sees that her friends like a page, it is easier to trust that brand and click the like button.
On Twitter the logic is different, and inviting people to follow you is often considered desperate. You need to be clever, hardworking and sociable to get respect. But when the followers start streaming in, you gain trust.
Don’t buy zombie followers. That is embarrassing.
It can be tempting to buy social media followers or likes, particularly when you’re just starting out and want to give the impression that you are a popular brand.
The problem with bought followers is that they are zombies, they don’t interact with you, which suggests to Facebook (this goes for many other platforms as well) that your content is uninteresting. It is then less likely to be shown to genuine followers. Also, your zombie followers skew your follower demographics. As a result, you lose the valuable insights you could otherwise gather from follower data.
Zombie followers skew your follower demographics
The meters on Underhood look at exactly these kinds of things in order to encourage brands to engage in genuine dialogue with real followers. (See more about our algorithms here.)
Our meters reward brands for responding quickly to comments and penalise brands that have a large but passive audience, as it is symptomatic of bought followers.
We believe social media is at its best when it is used for two-way communication, where the brand is both talking to and listening to its followers.
Camilla Magnusson, Lead Scientist, camilla@underhood.co
Sami Kuusela, Co-founder, sami@underhood.co
Next post: What to post? Videos are overrated
Earlier post: Social media secrets, part 1/4: Measure against others.
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