Back to Basics: Essential tips for growing your organic social reach 

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Organic social media management can feel like a mammoth task at times.  And with many brands feeling the heat of the cost-of-living crisis – social media budgets can start to feel very vulnerable. 

So what can businesses do to grow their followings across platforms at very little cost? Our social media team has compiled a list of essential must-know tips to ensure you continue to grow your brand’s presence over the next 12 months.

Patience is a Virtue

Some posts can generate great engagement, bringing in traffic for weeks or even months, while other posts may struggle to match the same levels – or any kind of level at all. This is down to factors like timing, whether that be time of day that suits your chosen platforms or catching the zeitgeist. Using appropriate hashtags is also important, as well as using regular content themes in your posts – all of which tell algorithms what kind of content audiences can expect, ultimately, helping new audiences find you. Each of these factors play a role in determining a post's success and reach. Building an effective and expansive social network for your business through organic growth takes perseverance and an undefined timeframe, but by following the tips we've outlined below, you can get started on growing your social media channels.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

Before posting anything online, it's important to have a good understanding of your target audience and how to best communicate with them. If your products or services target teenagers, for example, you wouldn't focus your social media strategy on LinkedIn, and if you're targeting investors, you wouldn't solely post on Instagram or TikTok. Knowing your target audience and which social channels they're most active on is crucial for return on investment and for ensuring brand growth. It’s important to consistently check in with your target audience, your chosen personas may evolve over time. An essential starting point is being able to effectively analyse the data across social media platforms and your website for your current audience, if you have one. This kind of data can help you start to develop pen portraits, or personas, which can help you tap into the needs and interests of the audience you’re targeting.

Understand Your Brand 

As you plan out your campaigns, it's important to understand your brand's style and tone of voice. These guidelines will help you determine a reference for all future content ensuring all communication aligns with the established guidelines. Brand guidelines can help you create social copy and how you should tailor your copy style per platform, as well as the overall style and design of your creative assets. 

Be Consistent!

Once you set your brand guidelines and have agreed upon a style and tone of voice, you're ready to begin posting online. Posting online is significant as it exposes your brand to the wider market. You can build momentum from the start, which should be part of your customer listening strategy. To keep this momentum, it's important to post frequently, ensuring you post during key activity hours for your target audience, in the appropriate time zone to maximise opportunity. Remember - not every post will get 1000+ likes; some may not even get one. Don’t focus on the negatives, take learnings from your posts, and ensure your content is engaging and of interest to your audience.  

Of course, any social media manager knows that organic reach is incredibly hard to find in a zero organic reach world. Well-timed paid social campaigns that piggyback off PR activity are great for giving brands short sharp boosts to followers. Sustained efforts such as this can really boost your overall organic growth. 

Tell Your Story!

Sharing your brand story can make you stand out – showing off your brand’s personality and human side, rather than its corporate side. Your target audience will find it much easier to connect with a person compared to a corporate entity. You’ll see many brands utilising TikTok to connect, Duolingo does a great job at humanising their content. England Football allows consumers insight into the players’ lives boosting their overall engagement.

#increaseyourreach

Selecting the most popular hashtags applicable to your brand can be really beneficial at helping you tap into the most active segments - building up your social channel's following and exposing your company and products to more people. They can also help you increase reach through exposure within trends. Do consider each platform’s best practice when it comes to hashtag usage as this will change over time and channel.  Instead of making up hashtags, or digging through Instagram’s (limited) search functionality, there are lots of hashtag tools designed to help you generate hashtags, get stats on them, and much more.  The best way to get started?  Try one out like TagsFinder.

Need support growing your social media presence? Drop us a message at info@mongooseagency.com and our digital team will be in touch.