Maximize Your Social Media Reach In 5 Easy Steps

Social media reach is a major part of any marketing strategies. This should be one of your very first steps in promoting your content or brand. Social media reach is essentially your audience base or followers or customers. Without an active audience, your promotion efforts become redundant.

The following are the easiest strategies that you can incorporate to your marketing campaign to improve your social media reach. These techniques do not take much effort, are very simple and have proven to produce the best organic results.

5 Strategies to Increase Social Media Reach

1. Optimize Your Social Media Profile

Your profile is the first point of contact for an online customer. Optimizing your profile description with a link to your website, having a recognizable logo/photo, a keyword-rich description that seems organic, etc. are some of the ways by which you can keep your social media profile professional.

Optimizing your social profile makes it easier for the respective search engines to display your profile. On Twitter, you can use hashtags with your profile description so that the relevant audience can find you via search.

Using the most relevant hashtags and yet try to remain natural and organic. Optimizing your profile description helps your chances of ranking higher on Google Search as it displays social profiles too.

The same can be done with all your profiles. LinkedIn pages, in particular, rank higher on Google with regards to keyword optimization. This, in fact, helps both your reach as well as your SEO ranking. Try to have uniform profile descriptions. This doesn’t mean that you copy-paste the exact description across all your social media channels. You need to target the same keywords in your descriptions is all that it means. Make sure you have filled out all the profile fields of the platform so that you do not have an incomplete profile.

Optimizing your social profile is an easy task and does not require much time and is an effective way to improve social media reach. But, care to be taken while doing so as every social media platform is different and you cannot have the exact same outlook across all the channels.

2. Social Sharing

This is the most important benefit of social media. Provide social sharing icons on your website and across your blog posts. Identify and ask your influencers to share your content regularly. The more people that share your content, the better your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results.

I’d recommend using Sumo as it provides sharing and analytics of the same. It also hosts a list builder feature that allows you to capture emails for your newsletter. This regulates a steady growth of audience for your content. It also provides heat maps. This tracks all the website activity of your site visitor and tells you what portion of the site has the most clicks via a heat chart. To get the most from social sharing do make sure that your URL is short, unique and contain your top keyword.

Share your content regularly across all your social media channels. All your followers are not accessing their social media at the same time, people mostly stumble across content that is share-worthy. With that being said, you need to chalk of a schedule for your social media. This will help you in many ways. I suggest using either Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your posts on social media. These tools help you in scheduling content for days and also provide you with a detailed analysis of the same. Regular posting keeps your profile active and helps expanding reach tremendously.

3. Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are everywhere and there is no escaping this set of intersecting lines. It plays a vital and ubiquitous role in social media and has become a powerful marketing tool, especially on platforms like Instagram. The main function of a hashtag is to gather all relevant and allied posts from all across the social media channel. This makes it easier for users to search social media based on their interests.

For example, if you are posting something regarding the 2016 WorldCup, using “#WorldCup2016” makes it easier for people to find your posts. The interested users just have to search for “#WorldCup2016” and all the relevant posts will appear.

Using hashtags benefits you in more than one way. It helps you reach a larger audience and more importantly, the right audience. Many tools use keywords and hashtags to search profiles and content. By using relevant hashtags, you increase the chances of your posts being noticed. You can also have a unique hashtag for your brand or business or for a particular campaign. Hashtags also organize all relevant posts on social media into a cluster.

Hashtags are synonymous with Twitter particular as its entire search algorithm revolves around hashtags. On the other social media channels, hashtags are used to search for relevant conversations or posts according to your needs. It is also a unique way for brands to connect with their users. For example, if you post a picture of your new watch from XYZ brand with “#XYZ”, it will be easily identifiable by the brand.

Hashtags have taken over social media and it is the go-to technique to increase reach organically.

4. Visual Appeal

With the mobile revolution in full swing, scientists have found out that the average attention span of people is eight seconds, which is shorter than that of a goldfish. With such a state of mind amongst us, capturing one’s attention becomes a more challenging task. The challenge here for a marketer is to grab a person’s attention as he or she is scrolling through their timeline.

It is also a human tendency to be drawn towards a visual stimulus. Hence, by using images, videos etc, that muddle can be fixed. It is observed that posts with a visual aid such as an image or a video show a higher engagement rate than a mundane text post. The visual stimulus can be in the form of an image, a video, a GIF or an infographic. You can also attach just your brand logo with the post to capture attention.

When selecting your image, ensure that it is a soothing colour. This way it does not only capture the attention but also interests the reader to go through the post. Using infographics also is a great way to engage users via images. Nowadays, GIFs are becoming common across all social media channels and this has become an interesting form of visual communication. And in most cases, images speak louder than words. Many times people share or like a particular post just by looking at the image attached.

According to Social Media Examiner, 44% of users engage with content that has a visual appeal. So by using the right visual stimulus, you can increase your social media reach. You can also use images in your blog articles which would appear as thumbnails when shared across the different social media platforms.

5. Active Interaction and User Engagement

I cannot stress enough on this point. All the above strategies go to waste if you are not active on all your social media channels. Active interaction and engagement help build brand awareness and reach.

This is true with all the social media platforms. There are various social media management and monitoring tools in the market that automate posts and schedule a vast database of content in your niche to keep your profile active. An active profile satisfies the social algorithms and your posts gain a lot more visibility.

By interacting with your users, you not only keep your profile active but also engage your user. This cause a ripple effect of sorts and a lot more users will be inclined towards your brand. Regularly keep in touch with your customers by replying to their messages, comments, concerns etc. you also build a good brand reputation and this reflects as customer service.

By involving and engaging with your users regularly, you also have them active on social media. They act as your brand ambassadors and their followers will be interested to see what your brand or business has to offer.

Conclusion

Building your brand on social media goes a long way. Having a good rate of impressions and engagement on your posts is key in the game. These are some of the easiest steps which have shown us tremendous results with regards to social media reach.

Feel free to share with us your techniques and tips on social media reach that has proven to be the best.