10 tips to growing your social media accounts

You want to grow online but you feel like you are going round and round in circles? Each Friday I will be sharing my tips and tricks to grow your business online while trying to keep the process as stress-free as possible.

Let's get started then, bringing it back to basics.

Post consistently whether that be every second day, every day or twice a day. Make sure you keep to the same posting pattern. What you should do is uncover your own followers' Instagram habits by using the Insights feature of your Instagram Business or Creator account. This helps you identify when your followers are most active and allows you to schedule accordingly, ensuring your posts continue to appear at the top of their feeds.

Don't preach—tell stories instead as Sally owner of Well Told says: Your story is a superpower. It can help you attract customers and motivate employees. People these days are craving connection, and storytelling is a way to create this experience. When people feel an emotional connection to your content, they are much more likely to buy into it and share it with their peers. If you have ever done a workshop or mentoring session with me, you would have heard this next sentence a thousand times PEOPLE BUY FROM PEOPLE.

Build a strong brand presence. Focus on core areas like creating style patterns that keep your images looking fresh, mastering hashtag use, brand colours, and voice tone. It would help if you also were regularly interacting with your followers to build up engagement and loyalty.

Have a visually consistent feed. Although perfection is falling out of style, people engage more with the behind the scenes, candid moments. But the heart of Instagram is visual content, and that will never change. Keeping a theme running on your account can be visually pleasing but also restricting. I am currently changing ZINCs feed; it's just picking a style to use and running with it.

Choose the right hashtags. Make your hashtags too generic – think #summer or #fashion – and your post will face competition from millions of other accounts. Try to use a mix of trending industry and location-specific hashtags to find the best hashtag to connect with your targeted followers. Research your hashtags for the best results, spend time looking at what other content is getting posted under that hashtag. Does the hashtag read correctly when in long-form, think of innocent words, making a not so innocent word when wrote together? Look at the type of content and the number of likes on its top-performing posts—if your content matches up, you've got yourself a winning hashtag.

Create a branded hashtag The best starting point is a general branded hashtag. It should be short, memorable and include your brand name in some form; for example, I use #zincmediaagency at the start of all my hashtag selection. A branded hashtag will help your content more discoverable, drive traffic to your profile, and create a stronger community around your brand. It will also help when you are stuck for content you can grad a customers image and share it on your profile. This becomes a high engagement piece of content.

Focus on user-generated content User-generated content on Instagram is content gold for marketers. It's a chance for followers to involve themselves more deeply with a brand forming a connection, leading to more returning customer sales. Plus it will reduce marketing costs because the content is being created and approved by your audience.

Explore the full range of social media video formats IGTV, reels, stories, Live, grid videos, private group lives. Oh, there is so much to choose from. Video is killing it on Instagram and Facebook at the moment, the algorithm to favouring content that will keep people on their platform longer. Videos do this. I know I go down a reel or video hole once I start watching one video. Before I know its 2 hours have passed.

Track and learn from your best-performing social content. There are many ways to do this, whether through identifying the most effective hashtags and visual styles or understanding when the best times are to post. Through this style of monitoring, you can develop best practices for your brand. Reading your insights monthly to see if your customer trends have changed, have key posting times changed, and adapting your content to fit this. If you find insights a minefield, connect with a social media manager or insights expert (cough cough) to show you around your social media backend. Social listening and analytics will help you finetune your marketing strategy and increase social media engagement.

Convert Instagram followers into email subscribers How to convert Instagram followers into email subscribers, follow these three easy steps. First, create a clickable incentive in your Instagram posts depending on your target audience. For instance, consider offering a prize, free content, or a discount code, exclusive access to sales before anyone else. Second, once the audience clicks through, ensure the landing page features a strong call to action linked to an email submission form. Find the best email management system for you. Some website platforms have their own inbuilt email marketing feature, but if not try Mailchimp, send in blue or have a quick google to find the best one for you. Third, create a mailing list and email marketing plan to welcome new email subscribers so you can begin to develop more meaningful relationships with them.

Sometimes when you're growing online and constantly thinking about content creation you forget to cover the basics of social media. Hopefully, these tips help you. If you have any questions or would like help with anything listed above, contact me here or on any of my social platforms.

Make sure to follow me on social media for more tips and tricks to grow your business online.