Social media – friend or foe?
Time vs morals
Getting social media right is a complete minefield that most of us don’t have time to navigate. Our social feeds get a little TLC from time to time when we have a gap in our day or we stumble across something that seems share worthy. Social media accounts are setup to show a presence in the market, but a lot of small companies just don’t have the resource to give it all the attention it needs.
It’s a case of chicken and egg. Should you share good content with your small audience and hope it brings you followers? Or do you wait until you’re audience if sizeable before you share the good stuff?
Growing your followers first is easy, if you’re willing to flex your morals. There are apps galore to help you grow your social media audience. You can buy followers or likes, you can swap a follow for a follow. You can download apps to tell you who isn’t following you back and remove them from your feed. With a little time you have an instant and sizeable following.
“Social media is changing the way we communicate and the way we are perceived, both positively and negatively. Every time you post a photo, or update your status, you are contributing to your own digital footprint and personal brand” Amy Jo Martin, Author and founder of Digital Royalty
Growing your audience naturally takes a little more time and effort. It’s finding accounts through accounts and researching influencers in your field. It’s shamelessly contacting clients and friends and asking them kindly to follow your page, to like or share your post. You can research hashtags to see which are most popular, you can carefully select the times you post and tag everyone you know. Generating amazing, share worthy content will help, but it’s still playing the long game.
If you want a large audience as quickly as possibly, download all the apps you can and spend a good few hours a day swapping and buying followers and likes, but you have the underlying knowledge that for a while any engagement in your content is necessarily genuine. If you want a better quality of audience, who you have a genuine interest in your content, then it’s worth taking the time to try and grow your following slightly more organically.
My conclusion
Social media is something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stay ahead of the curve on, but I feel I know my opposition slightly better these days. I think the most important thing is that you’re happy with the content you’re sharing, that it reflects you and what you’re trying to achieve. A genuine, organically growing audience with an interest in who we are and what we do is preferable to a large instant following. If you get a few likes and shares along the way, that’s great. It’s nice to know that people like what you do, even if it’s only 15 of them.
Some links that might help you find your way with social media:
Social media frequency – Industry benchmarks
How to gain followers on Instagram
