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A PROGRAM OF THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FOUNDATION
 

IOM Blog

November 8, 2017

Expanding Your Social Media Circles

For many of us, the thought of growing our social media profiles is overwhelming. Luckily, there are two proven strategies to grow your audience: increasing your outlet’s exposure and optimizing engagement.

The following are tools you can use to increase your outlet’s exposure and optimize your engagement:

-Hashtags
-Advertising
-Giveaways
-Collaborations
-Twitter Chats
-Substance (content)

As you may notice there is overlap between these two categories.

Increasing Exposure

Hashtags

The first step in using a hashtag is to create one that is relevant to your organization. You want to use hashtags that are popular and relevant to your post such as #IOMeducates, #highereducation, #marketing. Using hashtags gives you exposure to audiences beyond who you are currently engaged with. Every time a hashtag is used it is consolidated into one crowd sourced feed. By clicking on #coffee each post that includes the #coffee, will be shown in a single news thread.

Advertising

Free advertising can be extremely useful but paid advertising can take your organization to the next level. Extremely effective advertisements for professional organizations target their audiences through platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Social Media ads are user-friendly, natively integrated, and reach large audiences with pinpoint targeting.

Giveaways

Engaging is difficult, however, it is important because it builds an engaged online community. This leads to greater brand loyalty, completed call to actions (CTA), and ultimately if necessary, conversions.

Engagement is also essential for building a brand a voice.

On Facebook or Instagram you may see a post that says “repost this photo and follow me for a chance to win ____”. Audiences respond to incentives and this is a great way to have a completed CTA. This leads to followers and exposure from your users’ audience, which is likely to be demographically similar to your target audience. You have to be careful, as after the contest period is over, you could lose some audience members. This is where collaborations fit into the picture.

Collaborations

Collaborating with other organizations increases your impressions by giving exposure to a demographically similar but previously untapped audience. Collaborate with an individual or another organization and swap posts on Instagram or Twitter for a day. This exchange increases both side’s exposure and shows that your organization is involved in the community and working with others to achieve success. It also leads to greater brand awareness, which is the basis of a long term strategy to ultimately build brand loyalty.

Optimizing engagement

Substance

People decide to follow others on social media based on people or organizations they like, trust, and admire. Social media is a way for people to explore their curiosity. With this curiosity, it is important to engage followers with emotion. What can you teach your followers, how can you entertain them, or why do they want to join your organization? You have to give your followers something they want in snapshots and relate to them quickly. An engaged audience is possible through involvement, information, and inspiration.

Building routines based on your past likes, engagements and clicks on your outlets, creates a platform, and guide to achieving your highest potential and outreach.

Avatar photo
Alyssa Kobernick

Alyssa Kobernick is the former program coordinator for Institute for Organization Management, a four-year educational program on nonprofit management of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Alyssa oversees communication with Institute attendees, graduates and faculty. Alyssa received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a minor in educational studies from University of Florida in 2017.

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