Social media is everywhere. You know it, we know it, everybody knows it. It’s the thing that keeps us connected to one another, offers us daily doses of entertainment, makes us feel better when we’re down, keeps us updated about international and local news. 

Do you find it hard to believe? Well, what do you do when you want to have a laugh? You look up some funny videos or some memes on Facebook or Instagram. Or what do you do when you’re feeling sad and you just want to talk with somebody? You video call one of your friends and have a chat.

When it comes to news, just think about the many pieces of information you found out about from social media. With social media, you can see what’s happening on the other side of the planet in real-time. 

Not only that, but it helps you become an active participant in events that are so far out of reach. You can inform people about certain causes that you know more about (mental health, feminism, conflicts, etc.), you can donate, you can become involved. All because of social media. 

Social Media Marketing Is Something You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Whether we like it or not, social media is important for today’s society. It became a pillar of communication and support between people and it is something that is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. 

This is why it is detrimental to take your marketing efforts on social media and create a social media marketing strategy. Just to understand how big of an impact social media can have on your business, think that 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. 

Not only that, but 54% of social browsers use social media to research products. So yes, when looking for a brand to buy from, customers are looking at the brand’s social media profiles. So if you’re not actively sharing content on your social media, you need to come up with a marketing plan and start creating content. 

But let’s say you already have great content on your social media pages. Now you have to draw people on your social media profiles and convince them to stay longer than just from a quick look around. And of course, you’d like to draw in your leads organically.

Here are our ways on how you can do that: 

1. Make Use of Hashtags 

Social media has evolved in such a way that it functions similarly to SEO (search engine optimization). This can be seen in a number of things, such as the option to have organic growth or paid advertising and of course, the use of keywords. 

The only difference between social media keywords and SEO (or PPC) keywords is that the keywords on social media come in the form of hashtags. 

It’s worth mentioning that not all social media outlets indulge in the usage of hashtags, but the big majority of them do. Besides Facebook, where hashtags don’t work, you can find hashtags on nearly almost every single social media platform. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tiktok, every single platform uses hashtags to organize posts. 

For example, if you post a picture of you and your friends on Instagram, you will use hashtags that are related to this specific topic, such as #friendship, #bestfriends, or #selfie. Big events can also create specific hashtags, which are time-sensitive and should be used in a certain period of time. An example of this would be #superbowl, #blackfriday, or #christmassales. 

You can also create brand-specific hashtags that you can use for different marketing campaigns. For example, Skittles came up with the #tastetherainbow hashtag, while Redbull uses the #givesyouwiiings hashtag. 

So, if you use the right hashtags for your posts, then your content, and incidentally, your social media profile, will gain organic growth. This is because your target audience will look for a certain hashtag and find the posts labeled with a said hashtag. 

The number of hashtags is also important. You might think that the more, the better, but that’s not always the case. For example on Twitter, where you have a pretty restrictive character limit (280 characters), you can’t use many hashtags, or else your message will not stand out. 

The indicated number of hashtags for the social media platforms is the following: 

• Twitter: 1-2 hashtags 
• Instagram: 5-10 hashtags
• LinkedIn: 1-2 hashtags
• YouTube: 2-3 hashtags
• Pinterest: 2-5 hashtags

2. Post at the Right Time 

Another good way to gain organic traffic is to post at the right time. Just think about car traffic. Everybody was stuck in a traffic jam at one point in their lives. 

Generally speaking, there are specific hours when the traffic is more intense. Usually, this happens when people are heading to work, when children are going to school, or when people are coming from work.

Just like in car traffic, there are certain hours when people stay on social media more than usual. Now, of course, studies have been done and that increased traffic time frame has been discovered. You can definitely use the general hours for increased social media traffic, but we suggest experimenting with your target audience and seeing which hours are best for your customers and leads. 

Depending on your industry and target audience, you might have to post at different times. There are social media analytics tools like Sotrender where you can add multiple social media accounts and track audience activity throughout the day to pick the best posting time for your brand.

Or if, for example, you are targeting teenagers, then it’s quite obvious that they are not going to be on their phones during class, so you might want to post after school is over. 

But to start customizing your posting time, you need to begin with a steady base. Here are the timelines when social media platforms have increased traffic: 

• Instagram -Wednesdays at 11 AM; Fridays from 10 AM to 11 AM
• Twitter -Wednesdays at 9 AM; Friday between 7 AM and 9 AM
• Facebook -Wednesdays at 11 AM  and between 1 PM and 2 PM
• LinkedIn -Wednesdays between 8 AM and 10 AM and at noon; Thursdays at 9 AM and between 1 PM and 2 PM; Friday at 9 AM
• Pinterest – Fridays, and Saturdays, from 8 PM and 11 PM (with a peak at 9 PM) and from 2 AM to 4 AM
• TikTok -daily, between 6 AM and 10 AM and the evening, from 7 PM to 11 PM
• Snapchat -daily, between 10 PM and 1 AM

3. Optimize your Content

No matter the platform, if you want to obtain organic growth, then you need to engage in a constant optimization process. Just think about SEO. The content on your website, be it blog posts, landing pages, or podcasts, to name a few, is always optimized to obtain maximum performance. This is generally done through keywords, meta descriptions, internal and external linking, etc. 

Content on social media is the same. If you want organic growth and interactions on your posts, then you will have to optimize your content.

Now, the thing is, you can’t optimize content if you don’t have a set of cold, hard data backing you up. Think of it like this. You take a test in school, and you fail it. You don’t know your grade and you don’t know what mistakes you’ve made to fail the exam. But you do know that you need to pass the next one. How are you going to improve if you don’t even know what to improve? 

This is where analytics comes into play. You need to take a look at how your content performs and then work up from there. So, take each social media profile that you have and look at the number of likes, comments, and shares that you have. Take a look at the total number of followers and how many followers come on a daily and weekly basis. 

Generally speaking, you can do this by getting a social media analytics tool. You can use SocialBee for this exact purpose, as it gives you the option to get the analytics that you need, while also automizing and customizing the posting process. 

Once you have all of your data in place, you can start experimenting and seeing what works best for your audience. 

Another good tip when it comes to your social media profiles is having your website accessible in your bio, together with a clear profile picture of your brand’s logo. That way people will know who you are right off the bat. 

4. Post the Right Content for Your Audience

When making content for your social media profiles, you have to keep in mind two things:

• Your audience
• The platform’s requirements 

Remember that you are making content specifically for a group of people, so make sure that your tone, your visuals, and the posts you share resonate with that specific group of people. Checking your target audience’s demographics is vital here. Here is usually what you should look out for:

• Gender
• Age 
• Location 
• Ethnicity
• Occupation 
• Education 

Again, if you’re targeting teenagers, then you don’t want to use a serious tone and a somber color palette. Instead, you should go for bright colors that stand out, a friendly and open tone, and heavy use of teen slang. Don’t shy away from using words such as dope or lit and you shouldn’t shy away from using memes either. After all, meme culture is very strong, especially on social media. 

You should also keep the platform’s requirements in mind. You can’t post quality content if the picture you share is blurry or can’t be seen, or if your gifs or links in your copy don’t work. 

This is why when posting, you have to pay attention to the small details, like how many characters do you have at your disposal to write your copy, or what are the indicated picture sizes that you should keep in mind. 

Generally speaking, you just have to be careful with Twitter when it comes to character limits. The other platforms are quite bountiful when it comes to this. Image sizes are something else entirely. Every single platform has custom image size requirements, and if you want your visuals to pop, you need them to fit perfectly. 

Here are the image sizes that you should know: 

• Facebook: Profile picture needs to be 180×180 (displays 170×170 on desktop) and the images you share need to be 1,200×630
• Twitter: Profile picture needs to be 400×400 (displays 200×200 on desktop) and the images you share need to be 1200×675, with the recommended aspect ratio of 16:9
• Instagram: Profile picture needs to be 110×110 and the images you share need to be 1080×1080
• LinkedIn: Profile picture needs to be 300×300 and the images you share need to be 1200×627

5. Engage your Followers 

A lot of organic traffic can come out of recommendations. We all have seen at one point a social media page that looked so aesthetically pleasing or had such great content that you just had to share it with your friends. 

On one part, this is what engaging your followers through great content means. But the engagement process should not stop here. You should pay attention to all of your followers’ interactions with your social media profile. 

This means following back the people that interact most with you, sharing content posted by your followers, answering comments, organizing lives, or having occasional giveaways. This will make your brand and your company seem more approachable, more humane. People like engaging with a page, as long as it engages back, so make sure you invest enough time in answering comments or DMs.

You need to keep your level of engagement constant on all of the platforms that you have. This means that if you have Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, that you should post and engage with your followers on all of these platforms. 

Having a social media account and not using it is not a good look. So if you want to start a social media campaign, think carefully about the social media accounts you want to have. 

Bottom Line 

Gaining organic growth on social media is not hard. In fact, once you know what to do, it’s quite easy to post and get a constant inflow of followers.  But until then, you need to learn the ropes of social media posting, and by reading and following the tips that we have shared with you today, you will be able to become a social media pro in no time.