The success of your small business’ social media campaigns depends on many factors; however, there are some common metrics to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns: The number of fans/followers/likes you get and the increase in sales and/or the number of clients during the campaigns.
Ideally, you want to obtain fans and followers free of charge – typically via smart strategies, such as “like this post if you agree!” However, that’s not always work in general – say you are promoting your sound/music-related products on SoundCloud, you might want to obtain free soundcloud followers using a different strategy.
How to increase my social media followers?
Sounds trivial, but you can actually increase your followers count with great success – if you know how.
So, to achieve your social media campaign’s goals in term of getting more likes, fans and followers, here are some strategy you can use:
1. Post discussions and/or forum thread
Typically, this is done by posting a discussion, like “let’s connect – please share your social media pages here and I will like and/or follow you – in exchange, you might want to follow me or other sharers’ pages,” on social media sites or forums. I usually see this on LinkedIn and several other social networking sites.
In good faith, people are generally will follow your instruction – they post their social media pages, and they will like/follow your and/or others’ pages they find interesting.
2. Buy fans/likes/followers
This is probably considered as the “dark side” of social networking – from a supplier, you can buy Facebook likes, Twitter followers, and more. This is typically used to boost your followers counts and likes – which will gain you some benefits, such as gaining more exposures and so on.
There are typically done using fake social media accounts; good suppliers have done their homework by crafting fake social media accounts that look like real accounts owned by real people.
3. Like or follower exchange
A legit way to gain new likes/fans/followers is probably by joining a social media connection network: You can do ‘back-scratching’ in order to increase your social media accounts’ exposure: If you like/fans/follow my pages/accounts, then I’ll do the same.
Some likes/fans/followers exchange sites offer a more ‘whitehat’ way to do it: If you like/fan/follow a page/an account, you will get a credit you can use to get people to like/fan/follow you.
Which is the right strategy for me?
One of the questions you need to answer yourself is this: Is your fans or followers count really matters? Your answer will determine what strategy you should choose.
If your number one priority is to engage your followers, I think it’s best for you to do grass-root social connection strategy: Follow people you really want to follow, pitch people you really want to build relationship with, and do follower or like exchange the natural way (“Hi, I like your fan page because it’s so cool; perhaps we should connect and like my page, too?”)
If your number one priority is SEO and traffic generation, you might want to join a like or follower exchange network, or even buy followers or likes. As you might have already knew, Twitter and some other social networking sites’ posts are indexed by the search engine (even in Bing, you can see them on prominent place on the sidebar of the search result pages.) That is perhaps a good reason to exchange or buy likes/followers.
In my opinion, there’s no right or wrong answer here (okay – there are may be ethical issues, but as long as nothing is illegal, everything should be done at your own discretion.) The only issue you need to address is whether a particular strategy is best suited with your business’ needs.
So, what about you? Are you going to use like/follower exchanges, buy followers/likes or do it the grass-root way?