These Unusual Social Media Techniques Will Help Grow an Audience Fast

Social media is essential for a company’s digital marketing strategy to succeed. Even though many brands know this is true, they’re still not utilizing this tool to its full potential. Social media “shares” and “likes” are still relevant, but the credibility of a company goes beyond that. To fully understand the power of social media marketing, a brand needs a strong set of skills that allow them to grasp their audience’s needs adequately. To become more familiar with a variety of unusual but effective social media techniques, keep reading.

Improve Your Approach

In order to make social media beneficial for you, Social Media Examiner says it’s all about figuring out your audience and connecting with them. You can connect with them by figuring out what makes them tick, or in other words, what their interests are.

Your audience is the greatest asset for your campaign. To run a successful social campaign with plenty of engagement, you have to know your audience and what they’re likely to respond to and enjoy.

To gain these insights, you’ll need to do some research. Find out which social media channels the people you want to reach spend the most time on. Discover what topics they care about and what hashtags they use.

Don’t just listen to your audience, but communicate with them. When you show your fans that you’re interested and you care, and they’ll show you what makes them happy. Once you know what they’re looking for, you can launch a social media campaign that they’ll embrace.

Many brands have leveraged Pinterest to run successful social campaigns, including Kotex’s Woman’s Inspiration Day. The company looked at the Pinterest boards for 50 inspiring women to see what interested them.

Figure Out Your Customer Demographics

Customer demographics can tell you a lot about your audience and what you need to improve or change to identify with them more. Sprout Social offers up some great tips on how to do that below:

While the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis has to be completed before you can truly know your customer demographics on social media.

That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel. Most brands today are using at least some sort of dashboard. However, does your dashboard address your specific goals?

Whether you’re an agency providing insights for your clients or an enterprise company discovering your own demographics, an all-in-one dashboard solution is critical.

Try Using Chatbots

If you’ve never heard of a chatbot, Entrepreneur explains how this digital tool can help answer a customer’s questions without having to communicate with a “real” person directly. Check it out and see if it’s a good fit for your business – it seems to be the wave of the future!

You may have already heard, but chatbots are in. This comes as no surprise as they are the one digital tool that can communicate and resolve problems for your customers without the potential need for any human interruption. In addition to the above, chatbots integrate with the platforms that consumers now feel most comfortable interacting through: social media. Platforms such as Chattypeople make integrating an AI-powered chatbot into your social media strategy easy.

These tools allow you to create a chatbot that:

Doesn't require any coding knowledge.
Can answer customer questions.
Is able to take orders directly from Facebook Messenger and comments.
Integrates with all the major payment systems.

Play a Game of Tag

Social Media Examiner also offers another incredible technique. They recommend having a goal when starting up a social media campaign. In addition to sticking with a purpose, be creative with your campaign. Check out one of their examples below that helped raise awareness for a fantastic cause!

Before you launch a social media campaign, you need to know what your goal is. Without a firm plan in mind, you’re almost certainly setting yourself up for failure. It’s important to identify not only what you want to accomplish, but also the audience you’re targeting and how you want to connect with them.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge campaign was launched to raise awareness and funding for ALS. The “challenge” was for people to dump a bucket of ice over their heads and record a video of it to increase awareness of the disease.

via Social Media Examiner

After each challenge, the person taking it would nominate two or three more people to take the challenge and so on until people around the world were participating. The campaign grew exponentially in a short amount of time. So what made this campaign great? The call to action: Dump ice water on your head, and tag someone else to participate. It was simple, but impactful.

In your social campaigns, use a simple call to action to make it easy for people to complete the goal.

Make a Commitment to Learn Social Media

Sure it’d be easy to pawn off your company social media channels to a social media expert, but to fully understand social media sometimes, it’s best to learn it yourself. Buffer Social Blog mentions why committing to social media is vital for any business and how to get started.

The first thing that businesses and entrepreneurs can do to find success is make a commitment to social media.

Like any other form of marketing, social media for businesses can be a real challenge. It’s hard to grow an audience, create great content, and increase engagement. All too often we see brands giving up on social media after just a few months.

We’ve found that it takes eight months to one year to really get the hang of social. Not only to get a consistent content stream going, but to figure out what your audience resonates with and what they don’t.

It all starts with planning. Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accountable. Your strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan and goals. And most importantly, a powerful statement on “why” people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.

Create a Community

This tip goes without saying, but it’s still good to remind yourself just how important it is to create a community. In addition to building a community, it’s just as important, if not more important to connect with your audience. Entrepreneur sheds some light on this vital strategy.

Although “followers” and the many other metrics are important, they are not the “be all and end all” to social media success. You need to show your audience that you are not just a robot. Integrate personality through humor and emotions into your posts so that your audience can relate to your brand. Social media is all about being social, and if your customers see the same types of posts time and time again, they will lose interest. Make your communications interactive by:

Asking your audience questions.
Gathering their opinions on certain matters.
Sharing newsworthy information rather than just information about your products or services.
Liking and sharing some of their posts rather than just the other way around.
Asking them to interact directly with your posts through “likes” and “shares”.

Develop a Brand Personality

Buffer Social Blog mentions another powerful, yet unusual social media technique that seems to work for a variety of businesses. The method is developing a brand personality that will resonate with an audience. Don’t be afraid to try something new and discover what makes your brand and audience click. You may find that there’s a perfect way to connect that you didn’t think was possible before!

The second social media tip for businesses and entrepreneurs is to always (authentically) be you on social media.

Take a second to think about the brands that you follow on social media…. What makes them special? What makes you follow them?

Chances are that there is something special about the content they post or the way in which they post it. We’re guessing they have a personality and aren’t just brand robots pushing out content.

Creating a great social media presence isn’t only about showing the value of your product or service to your audience. It’s about connection and experiences. The best brands out there share a common point of view with their fans.

One of our favorite examples of this idea in action is Merriam Webster Dictionary. They’re a dictionary and they’re seeing tremendous success on social media.