Everybody who has a profile on social media has the potential to influence their followers into changing an opinion, making and eating a meal, or buying a new product or service on the market.
However, if you’re somebody who makes a living through their social media platforms, you may be wondering how you can use them better to create better engagement, and therefore, generate a higher income through social media influencing.
Understand who your people are
However you got into the game of social media marketing and influencing, you will have quickly learned some of the shortcuts to improve your metrics such as followers, likes, shares, and swipes on links attached to your posts. However, as quickly as those tricks are understood, the more you can lose sight of the people behind the profiles. Those followers are the people who will help to support your success, so it’s important to get to know your followers so that you can create content and work alongside brands who cater to what they want.
The stories feature on Instagram and Facebook platforms is a great tool for doing this. Followers like to participate in polls, quizzes, q&a sessions, etc to feel involved. Many influencers will use these to their advantage as it is an easy way to track engagement and to make necessary adjustments if your engagement is low. If you have 10,000 followers on Instagram but only ever get a maximum of 1,000 likes on a post or 3,000 people responding to your polls them you know it’s time to mix things up a little bit. The first step is to start analyzing which posts generate the most interest and what responses you get on your polls and use that information to create your future content.
Keep posting regularly and delete poorly performing posts
Ah, the algorithm. The mysterious thing that most people on social media will try to battle against when it comes to thinking of ways to meet new people. If you have a public account, then your page is going to be found by people. It’s gone beyond using the right kind of hashtags recently- everybody is trying to do this and perhaps not making the numbers that they’d like to be.
As a result, the algorithms can be a little off. A lot of social media experts will suggest that you should be posting quality content over quantity in order to increase engagement–however, the more you post, the more people you can reach.
However, that doesn’t mean just posting the same memes that everybody shares for a few ‘that’s so me!’ or ‘I feel attacked!’ comments. You need to find ways of posting interesting content. Give your prospective audience plenty of opportunities to see and engage with your content–while still understanding and respecting your target audience. For example, posting about chunky 90s style sandals or what to do with leftover chicken won’t engage the same people as if you’re posting about the Mavic Air 2s on your page dedicated to drone footage aimed at people looking for inspiration for where to travel to over what to wear while going there.
With ‘story’ style content on Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook, that content lasts for a maximum of 24 hours, which means you get can post more often without clogging up your own feed too much– you may even get away with recycling your content in order to reach a wider audience and to maximize visibility. On Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc, you can see which posts perform well and those that perform less well. Those that aren’t getting the engagement you’d hoped they would, can simply be deleted. There’s such thing as posting the right thing at the wrong time, so these posts can be reposted at a better time–which means your hard work in curating the post won’t go to waste.
Removing poorly performing posts from your feed will clear it up and show people thinking about following you that you only post decent and engaging content, without having to look through dull posts that never got the response you’d hope.
Learn how to create interesting content that people want to share
Keeping your followers engaged is the name of the game for running a successful social media enterprise. Sometimes that comes from creating content that is visually compelling as people scroll through their feeds. Keep pictures bright and editing to a minimum. This shows your audience that you are naturally talented. Filters are fun for the casual social media user, but won’t separate you from the crowd if you have a message to share.
Instead, try to focus on the overall aesthetic of your feed. Are your colors bright or more muted? Try to stick to one pallet. Additionally, memes are fun to share, but plenty of pages (mainly bots) will do that. Use your graphic design skills to create infographics about subjects that matter to you and are engaging people in wider communities. Make sure any information you share is fact-checked and not designed to place fear into people.
Finally- work on that bio. Aside from your profile picture and first few posts, one of the best ways to share with an audience what you’re all about is by writing about it in your bio. Most profiles will have character limits so keep it short and sweet, but with enough information to keep people engaged.
Work alongside others
Lots of social media influencers will start off doing all the work alone, but will eventually need some additional help to cultivate an image and persona that will attract audiences towards brands. Hiring an agency can help to create strategic marketing, writing the copy for your posts, taking the photographs, and creating brand deals for you.
While hiring an agent may be costly to do all of the above, even having some additional input in some of these areas can help to build your image quickly and significantly.
Social media influencing is not a 9-5 job. It requires hours of work to get the rewards you want.
