How to Grow Your Social Media Presence
Growing your social media presence across platforms is much more challenging than it once was. The digital world has become incredibly popular, used by many people and businesses worldwide, making it highly saturated.
As a result, growing on Instagram without burning yourself out requires both a strategic and consistent approach. It requires quality over quantity, batching content, and more.
In this guide, you’ll get everything you need to grow your voice online in a way that’s sustainable and successful.
How to create strategic growth online
It’s important to first define your niche, focusing more on a specific topic or target demographic, in order to build a loyal and relevant audience.
Batch-producing content is a good way to stay consistent and avoid the daily hassle of content creation. If you’re able to create, edite and schedule posts for the entire week, then it would benefit your efforts immensely.
It’s always about quality over quantity. While you might aim to publish several posts a week, if they’re not high-quality, they may not do well.
Leveraging collaborations is important, so opt for co-published reels or carousels with others to expand your reach. It’s also important to engage in sprints. Spending 15 minutes engaging with comments and DMs is a good way of helping improve your growth.
How to protect yourself and your mental health
Protecting your mental health is incredibly important, and while you may be making efforts to grow online, if you’re not looking after your mind, then both can take a hit.
Here are a few ways in which you can protect yourself and your mental health.
Set time limits
When it comes to going online, try to set time limits on how much time you actually spend. What can be five or ten minutes of liking, commenting, and engaging can very quickly turn into half an hour.
Use phone app limits like Apple Screen Time to restrict your daily usage to just those essential moments you need.
Post and leave
If you’re overly conscious or anxious about posting content, then just post it and leave the app. Avoid waiting for immediate likes; it will only become an unhealthy obsession.
Edit later
Take photos in the moment, but when it comes to sharing them on social media, consider editing and posting them later at home. That way, you can truly enjoy the moment you’re having in real-time.
Curate your feed
When curating your feed, try to follow people who inspire you and make you feel good about yourself. If a lot of the accounts you follow are doing the opposite, then unfollow those accounts. It might not be something they’re doing intentionally, but if it’s affecting your mental health, it’s better to unfollow than to let it consume you.
What can often happen when you end up following people who don’t inspire you or make you feel bad is that those feelings can turn into something negative. It may also make you comment on negative things on that person’s profile, which they might not have genuinely warranted.
Focus on your community
Community is definitely something algorithms monitor, but it is also a good way to convince others to follow you and engage.
Focus on building a community and real, authentic connections over time, rather than desperately chasing your follower count.
When you focus too much on your follower count, it pulls your attention away from engagement and content creation that your community will enjoy.
With social media growth, there can often be mistakes made, and it’s avoiding these mistakes that’s important. Here are a few tips to help you avoid the pitfalls that can set you back from growing your online presence.
Try not to compare yourself to others
When you compare yourself to others, you’re immediately putting yourself down. Once you start doing that regularly, you’ll become demotivated and lack the inspiration to create your content.
Instead, it’s good to remind yourself that everyone is within their own lane, and your success shouldn’t be defined by where someone else is at the same point in time as you.
Try not to overthink your content
When it comes to content creation, try not to overthink it. At the heart of every successful creator is content that is authentic, genuine, and driven by passion. Find your passions when it comes to content and create the content you’d enjoy watching too. Don’t be too focused on chasing every trend.
Hopefully, these tips will help your voice grow online this year.
