How To Get 500 Followers In 10 Days

In this day and age having a social media following is crucial to anyone’s success, whether it be for brand awareness, sales or even just your own personal image. Whether you are a start up or existing business or even just an individual trying to improve your following. This article is just for you! I’ll give you a short and simple run down of how I got over 500 followers in just 10 days and you will be able to apply these methods to get the same results.

Background

I never had large followings on social media growing up, nor did any of my posts gather much attention no matter how hard I tried. Whilst I was doing photography I would upload a beautiful scenic photo, along with an original quote and get around 40 likes. Meanwhile a “popular” kid could upload a blurry photo of a tree, with some cheesy comment and get 100’s of likes.

I would think to myself how is this fair, im uploading orignal high quality content whilst others are uploading low quality photos with cheesy quotes that every in the same category writes. I.e. “Go hard, or go home”.

So when I decided to start Rigour I wanted explosive growth, an engaging following, and high quality content. By studying the successes of these “popular” Instagrammers and applying my knowledge and experience in digital marketing and social media marketing I formulated a plan.

Step 1: Content Plan

A content plan is the first, and the most important step in growing your social media campaign. If you forget your content plan you will be running bling, you won’t know where to begin, consistency will be off and your topics won’t align. For those who don’t know what a content plan is, it is a marketing strategy that involves,

“Planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.”(Lovinger, 2013)

(An example content plan)

Before you begin filling out your content plan you should determine 3 or 4 areas that you’re content will focus on. If you do any more you will get less followers as they want consistency, they don’t want you to be blogging about cars one week, furniture the next week and business the following week. You’re going to want 3 or 4 topics and become the expert in those fields. I for example gear my content around crypto currencies, business/startups and motivation. Once your content plan is in place you can focus on the delivery, it is best to use a content pyramid to determine the best way to deliver your content. .

The content pyramid is an exceptional framework which I have only recently discovered that will help you assess the importance of different forms of content and how often you should be posting them. I’m going to quickly break it down for you.

1. Books, primary research and white papers: These are extremely informative and content heavy, they should be original and relate directly to you or your business. As for frequency you only need to upload these on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis
2. Long Blog Posts, videos and presentations: Blog Posts and Presentations are (in my opinion) one of the best forms giving your followers reason to come to you. They are often very informative, add depth to you, and/or your business and are uploaded on a weekly or monthly basis. Your audience will most likely be on the look out for these.
3. Info graphics and slide shares: I‘m going to skip these as I feel as though they closely relate to ‘Presentations’ from the second stage. These should be uploaded no more than once a week or month.
4. Short for blog posts and curated content: These posts will mainly consist of original short blog posts created by yourself in addition to relevant blog posts from other sources. You can upload both several times throughout the week to keep your audience engaged with new information until your next big ‘long post’.
5. Social media posts and curated content: I’m sure you can guess at what this is. Social media posts are your regular updates, quotes, content etc that you can post multiple times a day to social media accounts such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. They promote interaction with your audience and are the best method to engage and build relationships with your followers.

Note: It is important that the content you upload provides relevant and RELIABLE information to your audience. My best piece of advice for this is to follow all the relevant experts, media outlets and influences in your chosen fields as this will ensure you have a constant stream of relevant and reliable information.

Step 2: 10 Tips to 500

If you have followed my prior steps you should know what your fields of focus will be, where all the best sources of information and content are and how you’re going to deliver your content based off of your content plan and content pyramid. Now i’m going to present to you 7 easy tips to followers fast.

1. Follow: This is the easiest step. All you have to do is follow individuals who are into the same topics as you. On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter you can search via hashtags to see who is posting content using those hashtags, from there just follow them.
2. Social network: I actually skipped this step myself, as I want my friends and family to see the results once I have built something up. However for most, it is an exceptional method to boost your exposure early and make your sites more reputable. By encouraging family and friends to support your pages you will be getting a lot of exposure, especially in the local area early on and it will help make your growth much easier and faster.
3. Like, comment and share: Similarly, use the search bar again to find topics relating to your fields. Engage with creators by liking, sharing and commenting on their posts. This will help increase your exposure and form relationships.
4. Tags: Go tag crazy, just kidding. Like everything it requires moderation, post no more than 5–8 tags as any more just makes you look desperate.If you post good and relevant tags your posts will get way more hits than it otherwise would.
5. Support and gratitude: Having an engaging audience is extremely important for your content. You can have thousands of followers who don’t engage and your reception will be a lot worse. However if you create a strong following through engagement with them, they will be more likely to interact with your post, thus increasing exposure. To improve their engagement, support all of their content by liking, sharing and commenting on it. If you want to go the extra mile you can even dm them to thank them for the support and to try and build a relationship.
6. Consistency: We live in an era where we are impatient, we expect constant updates, instant replies, no wait times etc. So it is crucial to upload regularly to give them something to hold on to. But try not pump out content for the sake of it, you want to ensure that you are delivering consistently high standard content.
7. Insights: Insight tools are the best means for you to keep track of your audience and post reach. You can gather a lot of information such as their location, what device they use, when their most active, at what times your post get the most engagements, favorite foods, it’s all there. By analyzing the data you can effectively market your content by ensuring posts are made at the most effective times, in addition to aiming your posts more at the target market by producing more relateable content. For Insights on Instagram you have to change your profile to a business page in the settings, Facebook you can view insights directly through your page, Twitter click here and as for Instagram, you have to change your account to a business in the settings.
8. Call to action: Make sure in most of your posts you add verbs (doing words) such as contact, read, find out, etc. as this will make your audience more obliged to do whatever the objective, such as read a blog post.
9. The loop: What I like to call the loop is a method of linking all of your social media accounts. Essentially you attach permanent links on each page, for example, Facebook page links to Instagram and Youtube pages. Twitter links to Facebook, Instagram links to Medium and Linked In links to everything. The goal is to create a number of avenues for your audiences to easily view your various pages. Otherwise your Twitter audience, per say, will be exclusive to Twitter.
10. Rinse and Repeat: If you’re serious about building a following you must be prepared to commit, it’s like a new relationship. You and your users slowly get to know each other, you find more and more in common and eventually you will become a pair that supports each other. To do this takes time ( a lot of it), dedication and faith.

By following all of these steps I was able to get an audience of almost 600 followers in 10 days. You ca do the exact same if not better if you are willing to commit to it. Best of luck!

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For More Information visit Rigour on Facebook HERE