The importance of building an organic following is everything if you have aspirations of being an influencer. However, there is a common misconception that we want to address: you don’t need millions of followers to be an effective influencer.
There’s been a lot of research that shows micro and nano influencers might actually be more effective for brands to work with. That’s because consumers are becoming wise to sponsored posts by celebrity-level influencers and view it as just another form of paid advertising. These influencers are essentially no different than traditional celebrities and aren’t quite as effective when it comes to influencer marketing.
That said, it’s much more important to have a loyal following of people who interact and care about your content than to simply have a massive number of followers.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the easiest but most effective ways to organically gain more followers.
Choose Your Niche
One important thing to remember when building your following is that your followers can be anyone. They don’t necessarily need to be people you know. So when you’re building your social pages, think about:
-What type of page you want to have
-What type of content you want to produce
-Who your followers are
-What brands you want to work with
Some influencers have the capacity to simply post everything about their life and get lots of followers. However, for many influencers, this strategy won’t help build a large following. If simply posting things about your life doesn’t work, the best option is to find get niche with your page. Once you tailor your profile to fit a certain niche, you will stick out to followers who are interested in the same thing.
Some of the most popular niches are fitness, beauty, and fashion. However, these niches are so popular that you can even go niche within a topic. Instead of just ‘fitness’, try ‘running’ or ‘boxing’ or whichever type of fitness interests you the most.
It’s important to remember that you should choose a niche that is true to you. Think about what interests you the most and go with that. There are two reasons for this.
1. You’re going to be posting a lot. If you aren’t interested in the topic you post about, it will feel a lot more like work than it should.
2. If you don’t genuinely care about the things you post about it can come off as inauthentic to your followers. This will result in less engagement and fewer brand deals.
Follow People And Like Their Posts
People won’t be able to like your content if they don’t know it exists. In order to build your following, you need to put yourself out there. Follow other people and like/comment on their posts to let the Social Media Community know that you there! This is especially true if you’re starting a page from scratch.
You have quality content and want to share it with the world!
One of the best ways to find relevant people to follow (or people most likely to follow you back) is to use the explore pages (that look a little something like this)
Everyone’s explore page will look a little different as it’s based on people you already follow. However, once you’re here you can scroll through the page and find people who might be interested in your content. You can also use the filters at the top to get more specific about what kinds of people you’re looking for.
You can also search using hashtags.
This way you can find people who are already posting about similar content and follow them.
Another good way to find potential followers is by heading to the page of influencers who you aspire to be like and scrolling through people who follow them. If you post similar content to these influencers, chances are their followers would be interested in following you as well.
If you’re a business page, head to your competitors’ pages and snipe some of their followers.
It’s possible that people may see your content organically pop up on the discover page but it’s a very passive strategy? The best way to get your name out there and quickly build a following is to actively engage with other people. Be sincere, follow people who you think have the same interests as you, and let the world know that you exist!
Make Sure New Content Is Always Being Posted
As a rule of thumb: always shoot for quality over quantity. It’s better to have one incredible post during the week than to have 5 average ones. However, you also want to have a steady stream of content for your followers and don’t want to go weeks without posting.
For the perfectionists out there, sometimes you can only play with the filters so much and just need to send the post already.
If you don’t already, start using a tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to schedule out content in advance. This way you can spend a few minutes on Sunday or Monday scheduling out content for the week and don’t have to constantly be on your phone.
It can be easy to let a few days of not posting turn into a few weeks (we know from experience) and want to avoid this. The key to building growth in your pages is to constantly be posting new things and following new people.
Here are our metrics of how often you should be posting per week:
1. Twitter: 2-3 tweets per day that will be valuable to your followers. Then feel free to live tweet during the week as things happen and offer your commentary
2. Instagram: 3-4 quality posts per week should be enough for Instagram. You don’t want to overload your followers. However, you should make good use of stories in the meantime.
3. YouTube: Depending on the quality/length of the videos you post, aim for 1-2 per week.
4. Blogs: 1 blog post per week is all you need. Instead of quantity, focus on making that article incredible valuable and spend type promoting it. Blog posts should be around 1500-2000 words.
5. Snapchat: Since posts get deleted after 24 hours, you can really post as much as you want.
6. TikTok: As the newest up-and-coming social media platform, we aren’t quite sure how often it’s appropriate to post on TikTok. For information on WHEN to post, read this.
Engage With The Followers You Already Have
Don’t forget about the followers you already have. In a quest to gain a larger following it can be easy to always be looking for new people to follow but sometimes the best strategy is to engage with people who already follow you.
If you run some type of value-based page, engage your audience. Ask them what type of content they’d like to see. This not only helps get your audience actively involved in your content, but it also takes some of the pressure of constantly thinking of new ideas off.
Be Consistent
Just like building a business, consistency is everything when it comes to building your social pages. It’s easy to see other influencers with thousands of views or millions of followers and think that it came easy for them but this is rarely the case. What you can’t see just by looking at someone’s page are the hours that they put into constantly posting quality content.
We will end this thought with one of our favorite quotes:
“Long-term consistency trumps short-term intensity”
-Bruce Lee
We hope that you found some of this information valuable! We’re confident that if you put these tactics to the test, you’ll see your following increase significantly. If you’re interested in getting more content like this please follow us on Twitter and Instagram!
