The number one question I hear from new businesses is “how do I dramatically increase my social following?” It’s an important question to ask. Your social media followers are a symbol of business strength and can sometimes open doors. The answer is not as elusive as you think. Since starting my career in social media in 2006, I’ve found the following tactics to be to most impactful.
Photo Credit: JustFab.com
1.Site integration To Amp Up Daily Incremental Growth + Sweepstakes
Solution: Integrate a“Follow/Like” plugin onto your website to capture highly engaged site visitors to join your community. Incentivize immediate action with sweepstakes.
Implementation: In 2013, JustFab Launched the “Win A Year Of Free Shoes” Like to Win Sweepstakes. By integrating the Facebook Like Button Plugin on the homepage, JustFab dramatically increased daily fan growth. Email banners and social posts supported the sweepstake.
Impact: Increased daily channel growth by 3x.
2. Email Integration + Sweepstakes
Solution: Dedicated email driving to social channel. Incentivize immediate action with sweepstakes.
Implementation: In 2014, JustFab launched quarterly emails to drive email traffic to their official Pinterest account to dramatically increase their Pinterest following. Customers were incentivized to follow and pin JustFab content with a closet makeover sweepstakes.
Impact: Channel size increased by 25%. The long tail ROI of new pins generated from the sweepstakes resulted in an increase in organic revenue from Pinterest.
3.Partnerships
Solution: Partnering with a brand, influencer, or celebrity on a contest or exclusive content will dramatically boost follower growth.
Photo Credit: ShoeDazzle.com
Photo Credit: ShoeDazzle.com
Implementation (1): ShoeDazzle partnered with Ashley Tisdale to donate proceeds from her shoe design to St. Judes. Ashley Tisdale has highly engaged 9 million IG followers and 13 million Twitter followers.
Impact: Through a social media takeover and exclusive content, SD increased IG followers by 5% in one day.
Implementation (2): During the Summer of 2011, ModCloth partnered with a new brand every Tuesday for a Twitter chat. Both brands would cross-promote the chat/sweepstakes that served as a relevant topic, such as “Back To School Fashion Advice” in the Seventeen Magazine chat. Partners included Benefit Cosmetics, AirBnb, Chronicle Books.
Impact: Not only did ModCloth boost their growth by 1000+ new Twitter followers during a chat, but they were also able to gauge which partners resonated with the ModCloth audience to pursue larger partnerships.
4.Share-Worthy Content
Solution: Consumers follow and share content that they agree with. Brands/Influencers who support the image the consumer is building of themselves. To be worth sharing, content also has to feel novel (even if it isn’t).
Photo Credit: JustFab.com
Implementation: JustFab made the business decision to extend sizes from xs to 3x. To accompany the campaign, JustFab launched the #FabForAll campaign which highlighted the stories of 3 women (diverse in age, height, body type, and race) who felt as if they couldn’t wear certain clothing because of their body type. JustFab styled them in clothing that made them feel beautiful and spoke to the growing subculture of “body positive” shoppers.
Impact: The response from customers was big. They fell in love with the campaign and brand. But most importantly, they liked and shared the campaign assets.
5.Advertising Spend
Solution: Even the most direct response Facebook Page Post Ads will have a positive impact on organic follower growth. Potential customers new to your brand will naturally explore the Facebook fanpage to learn more about the company.
Implementation: In 2013, Fabletics launched and as a by-product of aggressive Facebook acquisition, the fanbase grew from 0 to 1 million fans in 1 year.
Impact: During times of heavy ad spend, the page saw growth rate triple.
6. Engagement
Solution: For incremental daily growth, utilizing hashtags and engaging with followers will support daily average growth.
Implementation: By utilizing fashion hashtags #shoedazzle, #shoedazzlegirl, #ootd, #shoelover, ShoeDazzle was able to increase exposure of their daily content. New and existing customers could respond directly to customers.
Impact: In a test to gauge the impact of hashtags, ShoeDazzle found a 25% increase in engagement and daily incremental followers from the test post.
