Resources for building a following on social media
Hi everyone,
I'm about to begin development on a budget application and I'm also very interested in building a following on social media to gain followers.
I'm most particularly interested in making an Instagram as it's what I'm most familiar with these days.
Does anyone have a guide or can point me in the direction of how a web app should be developing their Instagram channel?
Thanks in advance
Need to start at the top here John, first thing about where you want the business to be in a year's time? Then work your way backwards to figure out a loose plan on how to get there.
Don't let a metric itself (Likes, shares etc) become a goal otherwise you'll fall prey to the McNamara fallacy.
Try to create a hierarchy of metrics that ties to your overall business objectives. It'll be difficult but you'll find that you sacrifice what doesn't matter and keep what does.
Need to start at the top here John, first think about where you want the business to be in a year's time? Then work your way backwards to figure out a loose plan on how to get there.
Don't let a metric itself (Likes, shares etc) become a goal otherwise you'll fall prey to the McNamara fallacy.
Try to create a hierarchy of metrics that ties to your overall business objectives. It'll be difficult but you'll find that you sacrifice what doesn't matter and keep what does.
I have used a tool called Linkcollider which was majorly built for social media engagement and link building but the major disadvantage with such tools was that they increase the follower for respective social media accounts which is not as per product and service niche.
I did this last year with an app that I eventually aborted. Instagram was my most popular paid advertising channel (got a lot of traction off one ad), and I did a bunch of daily uploads for a while which kept organic follows rolling in. Detailed it all here: https://wogan.blog/2017/01/28/write500-one-month-in/
Since then, Buffer (iirc) has started supporting Instagram uploads, so it would be even easier to do what I did.
UPDATE: This post goes deeper into the actual results: https://wogan.blog/2017/01/09/write500-my-first-500-users/
Thanks - this will be my read on my flight in an hour. I'll comment back later.
I would focus on building an email list if you are just starting.
I would also research your niche on Instagram. Are there other budget web apps, or pages, or meme collections or influencers?
Followers on social media are useless.
FB cut it’s organic reach long ago and now it’s less than 5%. You can do better on IG but who knows for how long. It’s pay per play.
Build an email list instead!
Not at all.
People use followers as a metric for all sorts of things, for example, when building trust or convincing someone to engage with you.
While I agree with you that people (especially beginners) get easily impressed by the followers count, in the end when you have no organic reach it’s only a vanity metrics.
That's simply not the case.
If that metric allows you to leverage other peoples organic reach than it's no longer "only a vanity metric" regardless of the person being a beginner or not.
"If you add my backlink on your heavily SEO'ed, highly trafficked site I'll blast my 200 million social followers about your product."
That cold email works. That has direct and immediate impact for you and your product/business.
RE: instagram --> Find the influencers and hashtags in your niche. Engage with everyone who makes a comment: either like them or answer their quesetions. 20% of your content should be about you, 80% about other stuff in the niche.
I think you'll like this tutorial video too: https://www.coursenvy.com/grow-email-list-1200-subscribers-30-day-using-free-traffic/
P.S. aim to have a 5:1 ratio of email followers to insta followers. Although it seems unintuitve cause it's older, Email is the way to go. Read into this more if you don't quite believe me because it can be very unintuitive and you made need to hear it from a few others.
Hmmz.. I've only recently started an Instagram account for Shipharder.com and I noticed that putting up good quotes, along with meaningful descriptions and the right hashtag keywords added to them works nicely. 5 posts and I'm in 16 followers and numerous quotes.
Hashtagging is very important because it lets your Instagram posts pass along on other peoples timelines.
The second tip I can give you: automate the hell out of your Social Media interactions. I tought myself to setup Quuu (selecting messages on specific topics, hooking them up with Buffer.com to fill a social media timeline (planned posts on personally setup points of the week) and it helps keeping my online accounts (it can send stuff to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more - 3 channels in the free tier) and keeps them from dying out.
Hoping that helps
Thanks - I think having a great social media account is really important in today's world.
In the next few weeks I plan on sitting down and making maybe 20 or 30 posts in one sitting and scheduling them all out so I can forget about it, at least the making of posts.
I make a couple of posts at once, often quotes or things to think about and set them up. Then there's the aforementioned Quuu content that's being put in (on post p/day) and then there are the interesting things I find online that I put in and my own content and actual posts. All together they form a nice bouquet of social media content 💐