Launching a new brand on social media is difficult. It takes time to build your audience, find your voice, and win the attention of your target market. But what if you could speed that up a little bit? How you ask? Just ask your friends. Your friends, whether they are personal or professional, probably have a sizeable head start on your social media presence, and their reach is exponential. A current side project of mine with a non-existent budget has lead me to try this technique to boost our following on social media networks across the board as well as promote a single message in a well orchestrated social media blast. Here is what I did to plan this.
Talk It Up
We started talking to people around town that are in a related or relevant industry. For instance, if you are selling paper, talk to your printer friends. We let them know what we were planning and gave them a reason to be excited about it. We then asked them if it would be okay to contact them about helping spread the word on social media.
Count And Observe
We then started making a list of our friends and businesses that we had talked to. We checked out what social media networks they were on and gauged how active they are. Make a note of people and businesses with exceptional followings and high levels of interaction.
Craft Your Message
We then crafted our message to our friends asking for their help. We gave them options to post a message to any of the social media networks we were on with a message they could copy and paste to make it easy or the option to create their own message by providing the link they need to use to do so. We also asked if people would be willing to invite their friends to like our page on facebook from their personal accounts. With the route that facebook has gone to try to monetize it is hard to gain traction organically. A personal referral for page likes continues to be the best way to gain traction without paying for it. It can be an incredibly powerful tool.
Be clear and concise on how people can help you, most people will. Your friends can be an incredibly powerful resource when trying to build a new social media presence if you put in the work to make the connections (sometimes offline), and lay the groundwork early on in your project.
Photo Credit: marc falardeaucc
