17 expert tips to skyrocket your social media following 

Are you looking to expand your business and accelerate growth, yet find yourself stuck as every cheat sheet seems to skirt around the actual methods for increasing your social media followers? If so, you’ve come to the right place. 

Social media is vital for every business, beginning with the crucial step of increasing your follower count on each platform. Yet, the challenge for most businesses lies in converting social media users into dedicated followers. As attention spans dwindle, a unique approach is necessary to truly connect with your audience. 

This blog post delivers the essential tips and strategies your business requires to elevate your social media presence to new heights. 

Why do social media followers matter?

Your social media follower count is as important as engagement, impressions, reach, and clicks. The social media follower count across platforms is responsible for driving customer trust, boosting reputation, and fostering engagement in many instances. 

Investing in growing followers for their social media is essential for businesses, because:  

• Social media algorithms favor those with a higher follower count. A high follower count adds credibility to your social media profile. It indicates that your content is valuable, meriting broader exposure. 
• A larger social media following boosts engagement rates – it’s all about the numbers. However, remember that only a fraction of your followers actually see your content. The more followers you have, the wider the reach and engagement you’ll achieve. 
• Customers trust a business with a solid follower base. Your social media follower count shows potential customers that you’re a trustworthy business, not a fake/scam account. 
• You can improve your discoverability to social media users looking for businesses on a channel. 
• Collaborating with social media influencers becomes easier as most influencers prefer working with businesses with substantial followers. 

How to grow social media followers for business pages: 17 proven tips 

Watching the social media follower graph rise slowly can be disappointing and frustrating. Well, not anymore. Follow our top tips on how to build social media following for business pages systematically: 

1. Understand your target audience
2. Choose the right social media platforms 
3. Optimize social media profiles 
4. Formulate a strong content strategy 
5. Post regularly to keep the audience engaged 
6. Develop a consistent branding and communication language 
7. Launch an effective employee advocacy program
8. Offer exclusive discounts for followers
9. Plan giveaways and contests
10. Monitor your social media inbox and respond to customer queries 
11. Collaborate with influencers, brand advocates, and other companies 
12. Feature social proof via customer success stories
13. Follow relevant groups and interact with the audience 
14. Formulate a plan to engage with your audience consistently 
15. Cross-promote content on other platforms 
16. Analyze content and find best-performing posts 
17. Geotag content to attract local customers 

These methods can transform your social media game. Let’s dive into each one to demonstrate how you can maximize these tips.

1. Understand your target audience 

Knowing your target audience well is the key to growing social media following for business pages. By tailoring content to their preferences, businesses can engage more effectively and see better returns on investment. 

The critical insights on your target audience that can translate into an increased social media follower count are:

• The social media platforms they frequently use
• The percentage of your existing customers who found you via a social media channel
• General social media behavior study to know what they expect from businesses 
• The percentage of target audience that follows your competitors on social media 

Conduct a market survey and tabulate the findings before you move to the next step! 

2. Choose the right social media platforms 

The key to business success lies in setting the right goals. This holds particularly true for social media marketing. Each platform has its unique traits and audience. Therefore, it’s crucial to choose wisely, ensuring you don’t overlook a channel that could significantly boost your efforts. 

Some important things to note here include: 

• Your market survey findings must guide the selection of social media platforms you will focus on. 
• Start small with a few important channels and focus on how to grow your social media followers on the strongest platform. This can help you later build a presence on other not-so-vital platforms. 
• Choose social media platforms that can fit your current resources and skills. It is important to put your best foot forward and get off to a good start. 

3. Optimize social media profiles 

Your social media profiles act as miniature websites or digital calling cards. What social media users find here will significantly impact their decision to click that “Follow” button. Make sure that they find an optimized social media profile with: 

• A complete bio containing brand name, physical store location, website/e-commerce site, Google Maps link, operational hours, and contact information. 
• Informational links in your bio to inform social media users about your business. This can be news articles, customer review websites, blog posts, and so on, except for other social media handles. 

Pro Tip: You can further enhance your social media profiles with story highlights on Instagram. You can curate customer testimonials, FAQs, and product links to drive website traffic and other relevant content to enhance the attractiveness of your social media profile. 

Check out our guide on Instagram highlights to know more! 

4. Formulate a strong content strategy 

Growing your social media followers significantly depends on what you post. Ensure your content strategy includes a balanced mix of the following: 

• Original content that’s helpful, short, and relevant to your target audience 
• External links to promote branded blog posts, PR stories, product pages, and more 
• Interactive content like polls, Q&A, AMA (ask me anything) sessions 
• Gamified content such as crosswords, find the clue, etc, to foster engagement 
• Memes to keep your audience engaged
• Topical content that helps you take part in hot conversations and boost engagement rates across channels 
• Video ideas that can engage the audience and cater to video-heavy platforms like Instagram and TikTok

It is important to showcase the true potential of your business, feature employees, and lead the pack with thought leadership pieces to make an impact on any platform. 

Pro Tip: Ensure you consistently post engaging content to retain your social media followers. And if you’re hitting a roadblock, leverage AI tools to generate content ideas that engage your audience. 

Birdeye Social’s AI tool helps businesses generate content ideas, develop them into social media posts, choose the right hashtags, and edit them to enhance their impact. All with a few clicks, without leaving the social media management platform. 

5. Post regularly to engage your audience 

Once you know what to post, the next step is to formulate a plan to publish this content consistently on your social media platforms. 

Social media platforms reward consistency; the more regular you are, the higher your chances of reaching your intended audience. Customers are also likely to trust a business that shows up more consistently than the one that posts occasionally on a whim. 

To ensure that you have a strong content publishing plan, we recommend developing a content calendar. This helps you plan your content, identify gaps, schedule the content ahead, and make changes as required. 

With Birdeye Social, businesses can visualize their content calendar, view scheduled posts across all locations, and stay on top of their game at all times. 

“We totally depend on Birdeye’s social media calendar. We schedule out our content in advance, which is super helpful. Although we like to say we pride ourselves on each practice operating independently for things like holiday hours, we do create bulk messages and posts that can be used across multiple locations. 

This saves us a ton of time. It creates consistency, and it’s super convenient to log into one dashboard and see everything scheduled across different platforms.”

Meghan Bingham Senior Operations Manager Valley Vet Care

6. Develop a consistent branding and language 

Consistency is key in social media, encompassing branding, communication, and customer engagement. Many businesses regularly post content but overlook the importance of consistent language and design. 

A consistent approach in branding your posts helps boost brand awareness and displays a heightened sense of professionalism, setting you apart in a crowded space. 

For best results, businesses must ensure:

• All social media pages use a consistent color, font, and overall design style aligning with their brand style guidelines. 
• All customer interactions are consistent in tone, phrasing, and overall approach. 
• Social media managers stay professional and adopt a helpful approach toward the followers in comments, DMs, or any related social media forum. 

7. Launch an effective employee advocacy program 

Driving engagement with organic content is a steep challenge for businesses on platforms such as LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. These platforms favor content that sparks widespread conversation, often leaving business-related posts in the background. 

And that is where employee advocacy programs step in. You can start by encouraging employees to share your content with their peers, spread the word about your business, and actively participate in meaningful conversations. 

This gives your organic content strategy a significant boost and helps you outshine your competitors in reach. The higher the reach, the faster your social media followers grow. 

Birdeye’s LinkedIn growth is a shining example of how to build a social media following for business pages with the employee advocacy program. As Jody Mayers shares with us, launching this program gave a leg up to the content that was being up on the channel and helped them scale their LinkedIn followers from less than 100k to over 270k in the shortest period. 

“Over the past year, we’ve experienced a remarkable surge in follower growth, thanks to the dedication of our advocacy group employees. Our follower count has soared from 159k to over 314k today. 

We maintain a strategic approach in guiding the group’s sharing activities, whether it’s about promoting a campaign, unveiling a new product, or celebrating a Birdeye award. 

Ultimately, every share translates to increased exposure to our content. Our employees are the biggest alley we have. It takes a village when it comes to social media, and we have a perfect one!” 

Jody Mayers, Social media manager, Birdeye 

8. Offer exclusive discounts for followers 

Have you asked your existing customers if they follow you on social media? If not, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. While most follower growth strategies focus on acquiring followers to convert them into customers, the inverse can also work. 

All businesses need to do is request existing customers to follow them on social media channels in exchange for a small discount. You can set up QR code kiosks or posters in your stores or share social media links in emails or SMS for quick access. 

This simple process can help you get your customers to become your followers. Once they are in, you can leverage their presence to get online reviews on these platforms or virtual shoutouts for your brand. 

9. Plan giveaways and contests 

One of the most common ways of growing your social media followers is via giveaways and contests. Here’s how it works:

Your existing followers participate in the contests by inviting/tagging their peers, friends, and family to follow your business’ social media page. This boosts your follower count while also increasing engagement rates for your page. 

The increased engagement leads to a higher reach of your content and improves your exposure to similar audiences, leading to new people following your page. 

10. Monitor your social media inbox and respond to customer queries 

Customers are increasingly discovering businesses via social media channels. Staying active here and instantly responding to their direct messages (DMs) can give you an edge over your competitors. 

Let us consider what a typical customer experiences while encountering your business on social media. The customer most likely browses through your page and expresses interest via a direct message. Monitoring your social media inbox can help you instantly respond to the message. This, in turn, builds trust in your brand and will convince the customer to stay connected by “following” your page.

Use a social media management tool like Birdeye Social that helps you monitor all channels from a single inbox, gets instant notifications, and allows you to leverage generative AI to draft replies. 

11. Collaborate with influencers, brand advocates, and other companies 

Borrowing clout is a time-tested tactic that can help businesses grow social media follower count. If you’re just starting on a channel and wondering how to reach your target audience, start by:

• Finding micro-influencers in your industry who can promote your business to their audience. 
• Collaborating with non-competitive but allied businesses to reach their audience. For example, home service businesses can collaborate with real estate agents in that location to gain the attention of potential homeowners. 
• Turning customers into brand advocates by working with them to share their experiences with their audience. This may be a small audience, but it helps you build trust in the community. 

12. Feature social proof via customer success stories

Gaining the trust of social media users is an essential step in turning them into a follower. And you can do that by featuring customer testimonials, reviews, and success stories on your profile. If they see positive results on your profile, they will likely follow you and eventually become customers. 

“Birdeye has been an excellent source of user-generated social content for our Fri-yay testimonials, which are super cute. They are created and branded by Birdeye with just a few clicks.”

Meghan Bingham Senior Operations Manager Valley Vet Care

While you can link to online review sites on your profile, we recommend regularly featuring reviews, video testimonials, or case studies within your content plan. This is much more effective in gaining audience attention. 

13. Follow relevant groups and interact with the audience 

Finding your intended audience from the billions of users scrolling through the channel might be tricky when you’re just starting out on a platform. But you can considerably narrow down your search with relevant groups. 

To give a boost to your social media follower-increasing endeavor:

• Identify relevant groups where your intended audience would hang out or seek advice. For example, automotive companies can look for car enthusiast groups, while storage company chains can look for rental and lease groups. 
• Share relevant posts in the group so that they can identify your business as a solution for their needs. 
• Interact with the audience on partner pages to expand your reach. 

14. Formulate a plan to engage with your audience consistently 

Consistently engaging with your audience via comments, reposts, and replying to their queries can help you boost the reach of your profile. This also indicates to the social media algorithm that your business page is active and can benefit potential followers. 

Highly engaging pages get an additional boost with the platform recommending them to people with similar interests. 

Some of the ways to engage with your audience to grow social media followers include:

• Running an AMA session
• Answering FAQs via Instagram Stories or X (formerly Twitter) threads
• Responding to audience comments 

15. Cross-promote content on other platforms 

Cross-promotion can be a powerful strategy to boost the reach of your organic content. Especially if you have a strong presence on one platform and wonder how to grow your social media followers on other channels. 

For example, consider a business with a strong LinkedIn follower base and wants to expand its reach on Facebook. They can promote their Facebook posts on LinkedIn and invite their audience to connect with them on Facebook, too. 

This works best if you share unique content on each platform so your LinkedIn followers also want to connect with you on Facebook. 

16. Analyze content and find best-performing posts 

Success on social media may feel like a game of chance, but it isn’t. Businesses must carefully analyze the performance of their social media content to understand what works and what doesn’t. This gives you a keen insight into what your audience prefers, and you can double down on those to expand your social media followers. 

Some of the ways to leverage social media analytics are:

• To track clicks, impressions, and engagement across posts and find the top-performing posts for each channel 
• Analyzing the success of each post to find the best time to post on each social media platform for your business 
• Tracking your follower growth and matching it against the content calendar to understand where the major spikes come from 

Experimenting with content is important to build social media following for business pages across channels. But it can be a challenge to understand what truly resonates with your audience, especially while managing multiple location-specific pages. When the team at Valley Veterinary Care faced this, they leveraged Birdeye Social’s AI-driven insights feature to inform their content strategy. 

With the insights, the team was able to focus their efforts on high-performing content and boost their social media engagement considerably. 

With Birdeye Social, multi-location businesses can analyze their social performance across all channels and locations from a single dashboard. 

17. Geo-tag content to attract local customers 

Many multi-location businesses have individual pages for each location. This helps them post location-specific content and reach the right audience for each page. However, attracting the right followers can be tricky in this case. And that is why we recommend adding geotags or location tags to your content. 

This helps your content reach the relevant audience surfing content specific to this location and improves your chances of converting them into followers. 

Plan, post, engage, and analyze – the formula for growing your social media followers 

There is no shortcut to grow social media followers for a business. This goal needs your undivided attention, meticulous planning, and a conscious effort by your team to engage social media users with the right content. 

Start by developing a solid social media profile with engaging content to interest them on your page. Then, treat them well with consistent efforts and a helpful attitude. 

Chasing trends works sometimes. But diving into your content analytics and metrics is also important to identify what resonates with your audience and double down on that for the best results. 

Frequently asked questions on social media followers 

Supercharge your social media growth with Birdeye 

Balancing the growth of your business’s social media presence with day-to-day operations is a significant challenge. This is particularly true for multi-location businesses that manage individual pages for each location and replicate tasks across them. 

This is precisely why Birdeye has created a specialized social media management platform tailored for the needs of multi-location businesses. With Birdeye Social, you can generate content ideas, leverage AI to write social media posts, bulk post to each location with custom tokens, enrich posts with stock images, and more. 

If you’re stuck wondering how to grow social media followers for business pages, sign up for Birdeye Social today and never worry about social media again.