How to Build and Boost Your New Social Media Business Profiles in 2021
If you are building a new social media presence for a new business, then you will no doubt be feeling the strain. It’s a grind at the beginning, trying to find new followers who are interested and engaged with your offerings. It can feel harder yet when you haven’t begun seeing a return on your efforts.
Social media profile building is an aspect of content marketing, which does make it a long game. So if you take it as such and don’t expect success too quickly, that will help you to think along the right lines. You do need to pace yourself, and allow yourself time before you see any return.
With that said, there are a few ways to boost and amplify your efforts. So let’s look at building and boosting your new social media business profiles in 2021.
Look to the offline world too
This first tip might surprise you, as it’s not all about online. The thing is, the online world became particularly saturated with business messages in the last year, due to the knock-on effect of Covid. As the offline world dried up, events stopped and shops were shut, everybody focuses hard on social media marketing and online business.
To be a new business or brand on social media, meant being a needle in a haystack - even more so than before Covid. As most of the world now has a little ‘social media marketing fatigue’ from the increased marketing messages of last year, it’s an ideal time to change that up.
So what I’m suggesting is to re-engage the offline world too, and not only focus on online.
As shops reopen, if you have a physical store then why not invite customers in person to follow you on social media. Slip a business card with your social profile URLs into their bag at the checkout.
If you run an ecommerce store, then you can do the same by slipping a business card into your packages. Having an offline, physical reminder of where to find and engage with you on social can encourage more follows and even interaction.
You could print more than your social URLs on the card – you could request Facebook reviews too. Those are great for giving your Facebook presence a boost.
Try Business Cards to design those cards for free, and don’t forget your social URLs.
Collaborate with other brands or influencers
Influencer marketing is here to stay, and let’s not forget the power of relationship marketing either. Whether you team up with another brand to promote each other, or recruit an influencer to spread the word, there is a great chance to double your reach here.
Influencers often post with a tag and a product photo for money. But sometimes they will do the same for a gifted product (instead of pay) – so it’s worth looking into, even if you don’t have much budget to spend.
When it comes to relationship marketing with another brand, the deal can be as simple as an agreement to post once or twice for each other. This way you effectively share each other’s audience. All you need to do is research other businesses that complement yours (but are not your competition), and who have similar follower counts to make it a fair trade.
This is one of those times to just be brave, reach out and ask people to work with you. The worst they can say is no, but you might just get a yes and a great result at the end of it. A big boost in followers brings fresh energy to your social media profiles, and will give you a confidence boost too.
Increase video views
These days, very few business accounts have much success without posting videos. But in order to get views, there is a little known trick – and that’s adding subtitles.
Why is this so important to increasing views? Simply because of how we consume the content. When we are scrolling through social media, we are often doing something else at the same time. That may be watching TV with the family, or we may be slacking off at work for a few minutes.
This means that we don’t want to have the volume up. So in order for us to be engaged with the video that pops up on our feed, we need the subtitles to know what’s being said. Many people miss this trick, but if you use it you will see a spike in viewing time.
Facebook and YouTube both have native subtitle tools built in. If you want to add closed captions to a video for LinkedIn or Instagram, then check out Zubtitle. This is a budget-friendly tool that auto generates the subtitles, which you can then edit before rendering the video for posting.
Wrapping it up
Building a new social media presence from scratch takes work, time and patience. But I hope this has given you a few ideas that you can use with your own profiles to grow faster and see a return sooner.
Adding subtitles to your videos really makes a difference to your views, and gives your followers what they want – content that they can enjoy in their own way. It is always worth investigating collaborating with other brands, or sometimes influencers too. Of course, remember to engage with the outside world, as there are a wealth of potential followers and customers to be found there.
Enjoy the challenge of building your new social media business accounts. This is a great time to start over, and there is so much potential to be unlocked in the new, post-Covid world.