One of the best things that can predict your success in social media marketing is your level of engagement. This means how often your followers are actively contributing to your social media presence. rather than just the number of people following you, engagement counts show you how involved your audience is with your brand. This is a good sign that you are doing things right and it also means that your followers are more likely to take profitable actions such as visiting your site or buying products from you, as long as your prices are competitive.
Are you looking for ways to increase engagement on social media? If so, here are a few things you can try.
Defining “Engagement”
An engagement is any interaction with your brand from a follower or social media user. Generally, they come in the form of:
- Likes. Likes (or other reactions) are small engagements that signal you reaching your audience in some significant way. They may also support your posts so they become more likely to appear in others’ newsfeeds.
- Comments. Comments indicate interest in a given post, and in most cases, they attract other comments. In some cases, the comment thread can become more interesting than the central topic itself.
- Shares. Shares indicate significant follower interest, and have a powerful effect; every share introduces your content to a new audience segment, which exponentially increases your content’s reach.
11 Guaranteed Ways To Get More Local Social Followers
Use Local Hashtags
A hashtag is a word or phrase written after the symbol ‘#’ without any space or special characters. This will make the post more relevant for the intended audience.
If you want your post to be seen by more people in the local community, use phrases or words that are more popular as hashtags. This will result in more local social followers.
Hashtags are a way to label and categorize social content to make it more accessible to people who are interested in that topic.
Collaborate With Local Influencers
If you want to increase your brand’s awareness, especially among the local audience, one of the best things to do is to associate with local influencers. This is because influencers have a group of loyal fans who listen to their suggestions.
If any of the local influencers are promoting your brand, it’s likely that their followers will purchase from you. This allows you to spend your time and effort on something else instead of trying to build up a large group of local followers.
Engage Personally With Local Accounts
Identify your local market and narrow down your search. Find social media accounts belonging to your target demographic and send them personalized messages about your brand. This will help get your name out there and increase brand awareness. You can also interact with them on their posts to make them feel more seen.
Make them feel appreciated for what they are doing.
The chances of these people following you back are high if you develop a connection with them. This is an opportunity for you to get in front of their followers and friends, thus increasing your visibility.
Mention Location And Geotags
According to the data, tagging locations in your posts results in approximately 79% more engagement than posts without them. If you use words and phrases that are specific to a certain group or culture, people who identify with that group or culture will feel like you are one of them and be more likely to follow you.
In addition, they can see other images of the same place with just one click, which gives your account more exposure.
If you want to increase interest from your local audience, show them how your business is making an impact in their area. Making your business stand out will make people curious about it, which will ultimately be good for business.
Run Local Ads
The ads that are most relevant to the local audience are the ones that are specifically created for them. By targeting topics that they can connect with, these ads are more likely to be seen and interacted with. Advertising your brand on social media platforms that are popular in your area can help expose your brand to relevant audiences and help increase brand awareness.
This helps build your reputation and making your brand more recognizable to your target audience. This is a cheap way to make your brand more well known to the people who matter. This means that you will have better SEO and more social followers who are local to you.
Update Your Bios And Profiles
The average person’s attention span is 8 seconds or less! Your social media accounts need to be interesting to your local audience to capture their attention. Make sure your social media bios are complete and up to date.
If you want your website to show up in search results for people searching in your area, you should use keywords like “location-specific” on your website. Do not use too much or they will lose the human element. Make sure to add links to your products or website in your blog posts, to keep the reader engaged and increase the chances that they will follow you.
Organize Contests And Local Giveaways
Businesses organize giveaways as a way to encourage engagement on their social media profiles. To participate in the contest, you must first follow the social media account. This is considered the easiest way to increase social media following.
Giveaways will also help make your brand more recognizable to relevant audiences and help it become more popular. If you carry out these giveaways with a good strategy, it will create a positive relationship with your customers, and turn them into a community.
Tag Local People With Similar Interests
Social media posts that feature people tend to perform better than those that don’t. They have a better opportunity to reach their target audience.
When you tag people in social media posts, it encourages them to share your content and tag you in future posts. This happens because people feel exclusive when they get mentioned in a brand’s post.
This is where you need to make sure your tags provide value.
Do not just mention people without any relevance. You can reach a lot of people without putting in much effort or using a lot of resources. This has the potential to create a large group of fans.
Optimize Captions For Local Audience
While visual content is crucial for catching your visitor’s eye, captions help to give it context and make it more impactful. It provides details that would have been missed otherwise.
This is your chance to show how your business is making a difference in the community and connect with your customers on an emotional level.
You will be more likely to get locals as followers who could eventually promote your business if you do this.
Listen To The Local Community Online
Social media listening is the process of tracking what people say about your brand and industry online. Insights from this research can be used to inform your marketing strategy.
When looking at the data, it is only relevant to consider the local people.
Creating content that is relevant to your target audience will help you to engage with them better. The more local social followers you have, the more likely you are to gain new ones.
Share Engaging Local Content
When creating your social media calendar, be sure to include time for posting content that is specific to your location. This is the place to post blogs or even cover newsworthy stories that happened in your local area.
If you want to capture your audience’s attention and get them to engage with your posts, you may want to consider changing the content to be more relevant to them. If your audience enjoys your content, they are more likely to continue following you.
If you share local content, your existing followers will keep coming back.
General Tips and Tricks
Let’s take a deeper dive into the tricks and strategies you can use to get more engagements for your brand:
- Share personal experiences. Remember, people trust and want to engage with other people—not corporations. Stoke personal feelings and build personal relationships with your followers by sharing your own personal experiences, such as conferences you’re attending, or mistakes you’ve made in your career.
- Offer in-the-moment visuals. Today’s social media users want to feel like they’re getting instant updates; if they know a post is retrospective, or has been scheduled in advance, they aren’t going to waste time responding to it. Try to keep your feeds as lively and in-the-moment as possible—especially with visuals like photos and videos.
- Start live feeds. Live streaming became far more popular in 2017, as audiences demanded more instant visuals; 80 percent of online users would rather watch live video than read a blog. Live videos also give viewers the chance to comment and react to content as it develops, possibly guiding its development and attracting more viewers along the way.
- Do a live Q&A. Consider doing a Q&A or an interview while live streaming; take guest-submitted questions to encourage more comments and make your followers feel like they’re involved.
- Know when to advertise/sell. Few followers will engage with a post that is overtly selling something to them. Keep your advertising messages or hard sales pitches to a minimum, and release them tactfully if you want a chance to engage.
- Get involved in the community. Get involved with local community events to capitalize on your local audiences. If they see you posting about the event, they’ll be more likely to reach out to you.
- Do something good. Volunteer for a good cause, or make a post about sustainability or similarly noble initiatives that your business is spearheading. People will want to support you for making the effort.
- Partner with a non-profit. Partnering with a non-profit is a hybrid strategy, combining the benefits of “doing something good” with the benefits of influencer marketing, earning you far more engagements along the way.
- Engage with other local businesses. If you want people to engage with you, show how much you’re willing to engage with others; reach out to local businesses in your area, and exchange content and messages with them.
- Talk to your competitors. Don’t limit yourself to local businesses, either; consider engaging with your competitors, even at a national scale. You have shared expertise and a shared audience, which means each of your interactions has roughly twice the potential to earn you both more customer engagements and more followers.
- State a controversial opinion. Few types of content generate as many responses or as much discussion as a controversial statement (or article). Controversy means there are bound to be passionate people on both sides of the argument, and they’ll both come out to engage with your inciting material.
- Start a debate. You don’t have to be controversial to get the same benefits of starting a debate; consider asking people what their favorite fruit is, or which Star Wars movie was the best. You’ll get similar results.
Twitter-Specific Tips
If your audience is mostly on Twitter, these tips will help you earn more engagements from them:
- Keep it punchy. Twitter recently doubled its character limit, but it’s still a platform known for its truncated messages and overall conciseness. Keep all your content short and to the point here, or your followers will disregard it outright.
- Embed or pin your best tweets. Because of the short length and high volume, you should work to maximize your best tweets. Embed them in your site and/or pin them to the top of your profile to milk more value out of your efforts.
Instagram-Specific Tips
Instagram functions a little differently than Facebook or Twitter, so make sure you employ these techniques as well:
- Prioritize core content over conversations. Comments are popular on Instagram, but they’re not conducive to real conversations. If you want more engagements, you’ll need to prioritize the quality of your content over the frequency of your direct interactions.
- Find your best filters. Instagram has a bevy of different filters you can use, each of which conveys a different mood. Try to find a handful of filters that work especially well for your online brand and style of photography, and use them consistently to build recognizability with your audience.
LinkedIn-Specific Tips
If you’re trying to build a thriving audience on LinkedIn, these are the tips you’ll need:
- Go deep with content. LinkedIn is a place for more serious professionals and more in-depth reads, so this is the place for your more technical updates and your weightier content. The more original research and new opinions you can give your LinkedIn followers, the better.
- Focus on individual accounts. Company pages don’t do especially well on LinkedIn (unless you’re specifically interested in recruiting). Instead of funneling resources there, focus on building up your personal brands and getting in contact with individual accounts.
Ways To Get More Local Social Followers – FAQs
Q1. How Can I Gain Local Social Followers?
To gain more local social followers, you should identify your market and focus your efforts on capturing that market.
Q2. Does Influencer Marketing Help In Attaining More Local Followers On Social Media?
Yes, it helps improve your fan base. The thing that may impact the result of your collaboration with an influencer is who they are.
Q3. How Can Local Followers Help My Business?
Tapping into the local market through social media allows you to reach a huge follower base of people who live nearby.
