Growing your social media: professional secrets revealed

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If you’re reading this, you probably know that we at LIMVI Studio recently launched a pilot social media management program. In our pitch for this program, we promised follower growth, lead generation, and higher conversion rates. The question you’re probably asking is: how in the world can we promise that? What do we know that you don’t? Well, we’ll tell you.

Followers aren’t everything.

You might have heard the term ‘ghost following.’ These are people who follow your account without interacting—a group that comprises a surprising portion of the most popular profiles' following. While it’s nice to see the big numbers, ghost followings aren’t actually useful. It doesn’t matter that you have 1,000 followers if your posts only make 12 impressions. 10,000 followers matter even less to an account that only makes 8 sales. Your strategy should not be targeted towards the public numbers (i.e. your following, like ratio, etc.) but towards the private ones (i.e. conversions, sales, partnerships).

Content isn’t enough.

Of course, before you can worry about a ghost following you have to get followers. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t ever happen on its own. If you’re starting from scratch, no one’s going to seek out your content on their own. You can have the most interesting, most engaging content—it doesn’t matter if nobody sees it.

So, how do you get people to see your content? You have to put it in front of them—manually. Sure, you can take out ads, but they only go so far. The most effective strategy is entirely hands-on. What you need is engagement—which is something by and large you have to initiate and nurture. If someone likes your post, message them asking if they’re interested in following your page. If someone comments, reply and start a conversation. Even more fruitful is going to potential customers’, partners’, and influencers’ pages and liking, commenting, and following them yourself. People are more likely to engage with you if you take the time to engage with them first.

The recommended ratios vary, but on Instagram (for instance) we shoot for 50 comments, 20-30 messages, and 15 tags per account per day. This, in addition to the research into with whom interaction will be most effective, takes enormous amounts of time. However, it’s the only true way to ensure conversion.

Put your service front and center…

Nearly every piece of content on your page should relate to your product or service specifically. The ones that don’t should be about the field it falls in, or aimed at engaging others in the field and/or potential customers.

Additionally, you’ll want to establish and maintain a strong brand sense. What is your brand color scheme? (No more than three colors!) What is your header font? Your body font? What are your go-to image layouts and taglines? Your content should be instantly recognizable by the branding elements you use. At the same time, be careful to never allow the branding to get in the way of the content. Recognizable, consistent, and unobtrusive is the name of the game.

...but vary your content.

While your brand should immediately be identifiable, you should never repeat exactly. A good way to think about it is that your posts should be relatives, but not twins. Over time, you’ll want to introduce potential customers to the entire width and breadth of what you have to offer.

This component is especially challenging for brands with a limited scope of services, because you’ll have to consistently produce interesting and innovative content on essentially the same topic. Even brands that have many different things to promote will eventually have to cycle back through them—remember, social media requires daily upkeep for pretty much the entire duration of your brand’s existence.

Don’t expect it all to happen at once.

With all this done, you can expect instant rapid growth, right? Well, it depends on your expectations. Growth tends to be exponential, so don’t expect 1,000 followers in your first week. A more realistic goal would be in the range of 10. Don’t aim for 800 comments per post at first—a more realistic goal is 8. The big numbers will come eventually, but it nearly always starts slow.

It helps to engage and partner with other accounts of similar size—especially if there’s the possibility of collaboration or other professional partnership. Working together, you can help build each other towards success.

While it may be tempting, you must resist the urge to buy followers or use bots, as that’s a good way to get shadowbanned. That means the platform may not show your posts on your followers’ feeds or in hashtag search results—and more likely than not, you won’t be notified. You’ll instead just see an inexplicable drop in engagement and thus conversions. Any program or service that claims to be able to get you thousands of followers fast is likely a scam and will have the opposite of the intended effect.

Sound like a lot?

That’s the last secret: it is. It’s essentially a full-time job. Most professionals won’t have time to properly maintain their social media AND run the business it promotes—even an internal team is likely to find it inordinately time-consuming.

That’s why services like ours exist. We make your social media our job so that you can focus on yours. We understand that makes this entire post sound like a sales pitch, but we promise it’s more so intended to be instructive—to help you make an informed decision on how to strategically manage your social media. Plus, if you decide to give our program a try, that’s just a bonus for the both of us.