How to Build a Social Media Growth Strategy That Works [2024]

How to Build a Social Media Growth Strategy That Works [2024]

Social media growth reached a new upper in 2023, with 4.88 billion total zippy social media user identities, representing 60.6% of the world’s population.

How do brands grow their own social presence to reach that ever-increasing regulars base? We’ve got 10 strategic tips (and 3 tools) for optimum social growth in 2024.

Bonus: Get a self-ruling social media strategy template to quickly and hands plan your own strategy. Moreover use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.

What is social media growth?

Social media growth is an umbrella term that includes many variegated types of social success. How you pinpoint social media growth depends on the most important goals and metrics for your particular organization. Some of the most worldwide ways to measure social media growth include:

  • Social media follower growth: How many new followers you proceeds in a set period of time.
  • Engagement rate: How many people engage with your content vs. how many people see it.
  • Web traffic from social accounts: How many visits to your website are referred from social posts or your social profiles.
  • Conversions referred from social accounts: How many people who come to your website from a social link follow through to make a purchase, sign up for your newsletter, or any other conversion you want to measure.
  • Social commerce sales: How much revenue you bring in from social commerce activities wideness your social accounts.
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10 constructive social media growth strategies

1. Be zippy on your target audience’s favorite platforms

You can create as many (or as few) social finance as you like. But your regulars will only connect with you on the social networks they’re once urgently using. You need to put your trademark where they can find you easily, rather than expecting them to seek you out.

There are two components to this strategy:

  1. Your target audience
  2. The most popular social media platforms within that user base

For constructive organic social media growth, you need to understand both.

If you don’t once know exactly who your target regulars is, this is where you need to start. Fortunately, we’ve got a whole blog post on finding your target market that can point you in the right direction.

Once you understand your target audience, you can get plane increasingly detailed by creating regulars personas.

Now that you understand who you want to connect with on social, you can icon out where to find them. Our blog post on the demographics of the major social platforms is a good place to start your research. You should moreover do some testing to personize any assumptions.

Keep in mind that variegated segments of your regulars may be zippy on variegated social media sites. Or, people might follow you on multiple platforms but expect a variegated relationship on each. That ways you need to optimize your content for each platform.

For example, squint at how differently the Washington Post approached this news story on Twitter and TikTok:

@washingtonpost

Monumental Sports & Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) signify deal to move Caps, Wizards to Virginia #NHL #Hockey #WashingtonCapitals #WashingtonCapitals #DC #DistrictOfColumbia #Ovechkin #hockeytalk♬ original sound – We are a newspaper.

2. Create a resulting posting schedule

Humans are creatures of habit. When you post social content on a resulting schedule, your regulars knows what to expect. They understand how often to expect new content, and when to visualize your posts in their social feeds.

This consistency makes it finger less exacting for new people who find your content through a search or suggestion to click the follow button. Conversely, it encourages fans to seek out your new content on your profile if the algorithm doesn’t serve it up in their feed.

Just like deciding where to post based on your audience’s preferences, you need to let their social worriedness guide your plan for when to post too.

Posting when your regulars is most likely to be on the platform increases your chances for early engagement, which is a key value signal to virtually all social algorithms.

Hootsuite can show you exactly when your regulars is online with customized heatmaps for each platform. You can moreover find recommended times to post in Hootsuite Analytics based on your specific growth goals.

Hootsuite weightier times and days to publish heatmap

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3. Post short video

Short social video – think Reels and TikToks – has wilt a crucial component of social growth. Creating this type of content is the easiest way to unzip social media follower growth. Why? Considering it’s the content that’s most likely to reach people who don’t once follow you.

Instagram specifically says that for Reels, “the majority of what you see is from finance you don’t follow.” Likewise, Facebook describes Reels as, “content you may be interested in from creators you may not follow.” And TikTok is designed to surface content a user will find interesting, not just content from finance they follow.

Your short video content needs to uncurl with your overall social strategy and your trademark voice. But, it’s a completely variegated kind of content than you’re creating for feed posts or plane Stories.

To get started, trammels out our guide to making constructive short-form videos.

For platform-specific strategies, take a squint at :

  • How to use Instagram Reels for business
  • How to use Facebook Reels for social media growth
  • How to create a TikTok marketing strategy

4. Embrace social SEO

We’ve mentioned algorithms a few times already. But when you’re focused on social media follower growth, social search engine optimization may be plane increasingly important.

Social SEO is all well-nigh optimizing your content using SEO tactics like keyword research, captions, and constructive alt text to help the search features built into each social platform understand what your content is about.

That ways people who are urgently searching for content like yours are increasingly likely to find you

And there’s a bonus: TikTok search results are indexed by search engines, so you can momentum new eyeballs to your social content from people who are starting their search outside of social social.

5. Engage with your audience

Remember that social media is not a simple unconcentrated platform. Your regulars wants to see your content, sure. But they moreover want to interact with you, the trademark (or creator) overdue the content.

If you want to grow your social media presence, you need to be diligent well-nigh responding to comments, tags, messages and mentions. This isn’t optional, folks! Neglected audiences don’t stick around, so leaving your comments and messages unanswered works directly versus your efforts for social media growth.

The easiest way to stay on top of your social engagement is to manage all your incoming messages and comments from a internal social inbox, like the one built into Hootsuite.Hootsuite Inbox reply social engagement

Reduce response time (and your workload)

Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.Book a Demo

6. Get inspired by established finance in your niche

We talked well-nigh regulars engagement above, but it’s moreover important to self-mastery industry research. In this case, you’re looking for finance that are once performing well in your space.

They might be competitors. But they might moreover be potential collaborators. Either way, studying their finance can requite you a good sense of what’s once working in your niche.

Beyond strategy insights, you can moreover work on social media growth by engaging with popular finance that once reach your target audience. If they’re not in uncontrived competition with you, try liking and commenting on their posts in a genuine and supportive way. Catching their sustentation might lead to a return like or follow.

Connections between finance are a powerful signal for the social media algorithms, so connecting with relevant finance can help your chances of seeming as a suggested post for non-followers.

Keyword and hashtag searches are a good way to start your research here. And here’s a major timesaver: Search streams in Hootsuite indulge you to monitor all your relevant searches wideness platforms from a single dashboard.

Hootsuite Streams malleate hashtag search on Instagram

7. Work with content creators

This is flipside important strategy to expand your audience. In this case, you develop a collaboration with relevant content creators to piggyback on their established audience.

When your focus is social media growth, it’s important to segregate your creator collaborators carefully. Their regulars needs to be a really good match to the regulars you are trying to build. After all, a new influx of followers is only helpful to your overall growth strategy if they unquestionably want to stick around.

Again, hashtag and keyword searches are a good starting point. It’s moreover a good idea to take a squint at what other finance your existing regulars follows to squint for a good fit. We’ve put together a whole guide on how to work with content creators to take you from there.

8. Maximize your profile and bio

Sure, creating content is the increasingly heady part of social media. But developing a strong bio and profile are hair-trigger to social media growth. Make sure you have these nailed lanugo surpassing you start putting too much effort into other growth strategies.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First up, your profile and bio tell potential new followers who you are, what you’re all about, and why they should follow you.

Second, your profile and bio are full of opportunities to guide people to your worth in the first place. Most fields in social media profiles are searchable and may be indexed in regular search engines as well as in social search results.

Google Search results for Christina Newberry

That ways a profile optimized for your target keywords can lead people to your social worth surpassing they plane unshut that particular social platform.

And, finally, your profile offers chances to uncontrived people to your profile through the connective tissues of social platforms, like hashtags and geotags. Address information helps the algorithms connect your content with people in your local area.

9. Develop a strong trademark identity

Have we said unbearable times once that consistency is key in growing your social media presence? Well, we’ll say it then here, considering that applies to your brand identity as much as your posting schedule.

We just talked well-nigh how your profile can bring in people from outside of the social platforms. If they scroll lanugo and see resulting content in your grid, it’s much easier for them to understand what you’re all well-nigh and why they should care.

It’s moreover important that your content is hands identifiable when it lands in people’s feeds. It’s easier for followers to spot your posts among all the sponsored and suggested content when you unhook a resulting squint and finger that supports your trademark identity.

10. Experiment with social ads

While the strategies for organic social media growth covered so far are hair-trigger to growing a strong social media presence over time, social ads can be a way to get your content in front of a new regulars quickly — and uplift your growth rate.

Most social platforms indulge you to segregate growth-oriented goals for your social ads. Squint for ads goals like awareness, engagement, and consideration to momentum growth with your social ad campaign.

Planning a social ads wayfarers may seem daunting, but it’s easy to get started. The simplest method is to put some upkeep overdue organic posts that are once performing well for your desired growth goals.

Within Hootsuite, you can set will-less uplift triggers to convert your highest-performing posts into social ads without any spare intervention.

Engagement triggers option to automatically uplift posts that meet minimum requirements

Top 3 social media growth tools for 2024

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite dashboard page impressions and reach for variegated social platforms

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We’ve once mentioned Hootsuite several times in this post, and for good reason. It’s got plenty of seated social media growth tools that should be in every social marketer’s toolbox.

First up, Hootsuite has seated AI tools that generate social captions, come up with content ideas for your blog or podcast, and suggest the most relevant hashtags to get you noticed. OwlyWriter AI can moreover rework high-performing posts so you have a never-ending stream of growth-inducing content based off of strategies that have once been proven to work for your brand.

On the publishing side, Hootsuite serves your social media growth strategy by permitting you to build out an integrated multi-platform wayfarers that reaches followers on every platform at the platonic times for maximum engagement. You can create your content in batches so your themes and messaging are aligned and in tune with your trademark voice.

Once your content goes live, Hootsuite helps you hack your social growth by revealing exactly what works and what doesn’t. You’ll moreover get insights into how your content stacks up versus industry benchmarks and top competitors, so you can set realistic growth goals and squint for opportunities to improve.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot edit new email with visitor logo

Source: HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM platform that’s specifically designed to help your merchantry grow by bringing in increasingly customers. By integrating Hubspot with Hootsuite, you can use information from your CRM database to help grow your social presence while providing largest social consumer service.

3. SproutSocial

Sprout Social profile performance and graph of post engagement

Source: SproutSocial

SproutSocial is a social media management platform that can squire with social media growth. It includes automation tools and social analytics features that help you refine your social media growth strategy.

SproutSocial has an stereotype per-user seat forfeit of $332 and offers 26 integrations. Take a squint at how SproutSocial compares to Hootsuite.

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversations, engage your audience, measure results, and increasingly — all from one simple dashboard. Try it self-ruling today.

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