12 Quick Tips for Building Your Online Following

The hardest part about social media marketing is finding people to market to. Since the medium requires you to get people to follow and interact with your page, you have to go out and convince the population that there is value in connecting with you. Here are some quick tips that will encourage people to follow you.

1. Follow others – Pretty simple, follow people and some of them will follow you back.
2. Send people messages – There are occasions where someone that SHOULD connect with you just needs to be made aware that you exist. Send people a message and let them know you’re there.
3. Share other people’s content - You’d be surprised how far a retweet will go in building a relationship online.
4. Tell people offline to follow you online – If you are in a business that has a physical location, or if you utilize “traditional” advertising, you should be including some sort of notice that lets your customers know that you have an online presence.
5. Tell people online to follow you online – Put it on your website that you have Facebook. Put it on your Facebook that you have Twitter. Tweet that you have a Blog. You see where this is going.
6. Share shareable content – The best way to get people to follow you is to get your followers to recruit new people for you. Let them do the work. Share things that your target audience will like (Pictures and Videos work best) and let your followers share it.
7. Ask Questions – One of the most underrated aspects of Facebook is the “Poll” feature. This allows you to ask questions of your followers and they can vote on the answer. What makes it special is that when people answer your questions it posts on their wall. Ask the right questions and you will find some new followers.
8. Make your content searchable – Utilize hashtags for Twitter, and make sure your YouTube video descriptions have keywords in them.
9. Become an expert on something – Showing people that your page is a go-to page for a certain topic will give it life of its own. If you truly become an expert at a topic people will find you, share you, and your following will grow.
10. Give stuff away – People flock to free stuff. Give away something, anything, and people will find you.
11. Advertise online – If you have the budget, pay-per-click ads for Facebook and Google can draw people to your page. You will essentially be “paying for followers” but sometimes you got to do what you’ve got to do.
12. Be Different – This is pretty straight forward, do something that isn’t being done online and people will notice.

These are just some tried and proven ways to “get” followers, but they aren’t the only options. Try something bold, and try something new. You might find that a handful of your ideas will fail miserably, but it only takes one to make a name for yourself. Change the way you think and you will become memorable.