If you’re not currently holding your first phone, chances are you aren’t creating your first social media account either. But if you want to start over, take it seriously, maybe for the sake of a career in influencing or a business social media account, you want to hit the ground running. Take a look at our tips on how to grow your social media accounts from the start.
Create a content calendar
Don’t think that you can start posting and suddenly go viral. Your content would have to really be something special for that to work, and even then, that’s more a game of chance. Get yourself better prepared by putting together a social media calendar. You can plan content ahead, spread it out, and hit all the key points you want to, like photos, videos, Reels, Shorts, etc.
Additionally, you might want to read up on what individual social media platforms’ algorithms prefer. Instagram has just updated theirs so the “spamming” of hundreds of hashtags is of no use anymore, and it wants you to upload every day. Do you see why it’s necessary to plan ahead?
Engage, engage, engage
Once you have a following going, you’ll need to keep them happy and your content relevant. If you use some social media listening tools, you can do the online equivalent of listening to what people are saying about you. They might have feedback, they might just like you. This is called social listening. Alternatively, you might want to turn those social listening tools on your competitors and see what people are saying about them. Is there anything they are doing wrong that you can do right? Or anything they are doing right that you’re not doing?
No matter what you find, engage with it. A lot of social media accounts fail because the owner isn’t answering comments or DMs. They just post and leave. Engaging with your users isn’t only valuable for feedback, but it will encourage more engagement and create a more loyal fanbase.
Repurpose your content
One trick that will save you a lot of time is to repurpose your content. This does two things: it lessens the burden of creating lots of content for each platform, and it allows you to tailor your content to what the platform expects. So, for example, Instagram and TikTok have two very different vibes, even if they both allow you to post short-form video content. You can add clips that are more polished and bright to Instagram and content that is more slapdash and grainy to TikTok.
Additionally, a still from a video can be your Instagram content, the video can be your YouTube content, it could be made from a stream on Twitch, which can be cut down into clips for TikTok, and on and on it goes.
These are just initial steps, but they are a great step up. They are the initial steps that will slow a startup social media account if ignored and waste a lot of the creator’s time.
