Ask any marketer - or better yet, any person - what one thing they would change about their social media accounts if they could. More often than not, the answer will be the same:

More Followers.

Increasing your social media followers is a continuous battle, but there are ways to make it easier. In this post, I'm going to list 3 easy ways to increase your social media following that you may not have thought of.

A great way to increase your following is to show an interest in other people's social media accounts. If you like, comment, and retweet people's posts, they'll notice you, and some of them, in turn, will follow you.

When using Twitter to get noticed by a wider net than your followers and your followers' friends, search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand:

Initially, you'll receive the 'top' results - these are the most liked/retweeted posts, so you may not see much of a response by interacting with posts like this. However, if you look to the left-hand side, you'll see related searches which may help you find more posts to like.

If you click the 'latest' tab, you'll see the posts that feature your chosen hashtag in real-time.

By liking and commenting on these posts, you'll have a better chance of being noticed and gaining new followers, because there is a high chance that these users are still active on the platform.

Another way to get noticed by sharing the love is to post the content of others to your social site and tag them in it. Like this:

Just as people hate users that only promote themselves, they love users that promote others - it shows off your social nature.

2. Follow Others

One of the best ways to look authoritative on social media is to have a higher number of 'followers' than you're 'following' - like this:

Having said that, it might seem a little counter-intuitive to encourage you to follow others, but the only way to build your social media following is to interact with like-minded people.

When looking to build your audience, you should follow people that are a good match for you, users that are likely to follow you back.

To track and manage your followers, you can use an app like Crowdfire. With Crowdfire, you can access data relating to your Twitter and Instagram accounts. You can see things like your recent followers:

And unfollowers:

This helps to provide a better understanding of who you should and shouldn't be following.

The Crowdfire app has lots of additional ways you can use to find and follow the right people. For example, you can copy the followers of any particular user:

Similarly, you can use a keyword to find suitable followers:

3. Hide Facebook Trolls

So far we've only really talked about Instagram and Twitter, but you can't write an article about social media without mentioning Facebook. Facebook is the most well-established social media site around - in fact, over half (51%) of users told Publi.sh that the number one social media platform they couldn't live without is Facebook.

Of course, not everyone on Facebook is there to spread joy and happiness, there are a lot of trolls around too.

Trolls can ruin a good atmosphere and bring unwanted negativity to your Page, which could hinder your efforts to increase your social media followers. But there are ways to hide trolls from the rest of your Facebook community without causing unnecessary conflict.

You can block comments and posts that feature certain words by heading to page settings and clicking on 'Page Moderation':

Whenever a banned word is used, the comment is hidden from everyone but the person who posted it and their friends.

Another way to manage trolls is to simply 'hide' their comments. You can do this by clicking on the dropdown at the top-right hand-side of the post:

Again, this means that only the person who commented, and their friends, can see the post.

Now, you may be thinking "Why not simply block these trolls? Or delete their comments?"

There are a couple of reasons. First - if you delete comments then you set yourself up to receive even more irate criticisms about freedom of speech and so on. Similarly, if you block trolls then you'll probably receive messages from them wanting to know why. This can cause more admin work for you, and provide trolls with more fuel for their hostility.

By hiding comments, the trolls don't know that their post is hidden - and even troll comments add to your engagement factor. So every hidden troll comment increases the number of times Facebook displays your post, which ultimately increases your reach and contributes to increasing your social media followers.

Final Thoughts

Everyone wants to increase their social media followers, but not everyone knows how. The three tips noted in this article should help you to increase your followers in ways you may never have considered.

Source: SocialMediaToday

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