How to grow a social media following in 2020?
Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn, social networks are emerging as essential marketing channels for more and more companies in 2020. For an SME, it becomes complex to stand out from the crowd. on these platforms without an original and robust strategy. Add to that a continued drop in the organic reach of business pages and you will get a sense of the challenge that awaits community managers in creating a digital community organically.
Does that mean you have to ditch the idea of creating a Facebook or Instagram community in 2020 if you don’t have $ 100,000 in web marketing budget available? Not at all!
In 2020, the opportunities to create a social community without paying for advertising are shrinking but still exist. To grasp them, you will have to arm yourself with a method combining creativity, analysis and organization.
What is an "organic" social community?
On social media, an organic community refers to the portion of your audience gained through the natural reach of your posts, without using paid advertising like Facebook “boosts”.
Community managers use several criteria to assess a business page’s ability to create and grow its social community organically, including:
- The engagement rate on publications (number of interactions / size of the community)
- The scope of publications (number of views)
Social media, ever more present in our lives (and in your marketing budgets)
If companies’ investments in social media have been increasing continuously for the past 5 years, it is because the place of these platforms in the daily lives of their users is also increasing.
Between the end of 2019 and June 2020, the average daily time spent per person on social media increased by 8 minutes to reach 144 minutes.
B2B and B2C companies are therefore following the trend and are also investing more and more resources in social media to develop their notoriety, their brand image and their sales. By 2025, it is estimated that the share of social investments should represent nearly 20% of marketing budgets, compared to nearly 11% today (The CMO Survey, February 2019).
How to create a social community in 2020 without advertising?
Here is the action plan proposed in our webinar:
1. Build your strategic objectives
Before you jump into creating your first posts, take the time to establish your social media goals.
How do you want your brand to be perceived? Who do you want to be visible to?
To answer these first questions, as for defining your SEO goals, we recommend that you start from your overall goals and define the basics.
2. Define relevant editorial axes
What is the ideal content to create a community on Facebook, Instagram, and other networks?
While this question does not have a universal answer, the most effective content strategies nonetheless meet certain common criteria. Here they are :
3. Identify key platforms and adapt the tone
Does your business have to be present on all existing social platforms? Unless you are a multinational corporation with multiple personas, the answer is probably no. Depending on your personas, your business model (B2B, B2C) and your sector, certain platforms will be preferred.
4. Create and distribute content effectively
As is often the case in web marketing, your success on social media largely depends on the regularity with which you manage to maintain the highest level of quality in each area.
Creating a unique post with the best text, the best image and the best message is within reach of many businesses. The companies that manage to create a social community organically over time are those that manage to repeat the process every day, year after year, with a consistent level of quality. Sometimes all it takes is one bad post to disappoint your followers, as our webinar guest recalled.
5. Measure and adapt your strategy
To be able to create a social community and grow it over time, you will finally need to analyze the performance of all your content in order to optimize your strategy.
Here is a simple and comprehensive way to do it:
- Create a spreadsheet in Excel
- Take an inventory of your publications and classify them by theme, format, period, style etc.
- Compare the performance data collected according to the series established, the formats used, etc. in order to identify top performers
- Adapt your editorial calendar accordingly
Now you know how to organically build a social community - the action is up to you!
The various tools and examples of action plans presented in this webinar should allow you to identify areas for improvement today for your corporate social media strategy. If the “Social Media Game” can seem very competitive, remember that with a good working method, you will increase your chances of being part of the winning camp! Now, arm yourself with your finest Excel tables, send a Zoom invitation to your graphic designer, and practice!
