6 Ways to Extend Your Social Media Reach

As a Public Relations (PR) professional, you can spend days creating, planning, posting, and monitoring your social media platforms, but learning more about your audience is key to gaining more social media reach, generating leads, and increasing brand awareness. We can further break down these ideas to help expand your social media presence and increase your engagement.

1. Focus on your target audience to gain more social media reach

According to entrepreneur Jen Glantz, one of the biggest mistakes people make is that “they don’t ever speak to their target audience until the moment they’re ready to launch a business and try to sell a product or service.”

It’s a mistake because you need to know who your target audience is. To do that, you can use customer personas to your advantage. Customer personas are fictional characters developed by a brand to represent a specific user or customer type. It includes who they are, what they do, where they’re from, demographics, affinities, etc.

TIP: Sign up for a free trial of this social media analysis tool to learn more about your audience.

This lets you produce content that speaks directly to users. If you haven’t developed your brand-specific customer personas, we have just the post for you. Figure out what your audience wants to see or hear, and post that. But remember to always post where your audience can find it.

2. Meet your target audience where they are

Once you get to know your audience, you need to find out what platform they engage with the most. Marketers often use social media monitoring to get the audience data they need for their social media campaigns.

It’s also better to focus on one social media platform if it’s where you get most of your engagement. Focus your efforts on what’s already working. If the majority of your engagement and reach comes from Instagram, then spend your time creating killer content for Instagram. Repeat what works.

Being strategic about posting times can also help extend social media reach. Generally, you’re more likely to increase engagement by posting early mornings on weekdays, but you can use our social media monitoring tool to get data more relevant to your audience. You can also answer these questions to figure out which platform might be best:

What are your social media goals?
What is your product/service?
How much time do you have?

With answers to these questions, you’ll be able to focus on the best-suited platform. The next step is to share content that gets people talking.

3. Create engaging content

Engagement is a key factor in increasing visibility. You’ll need to determine how engaging your content is to see where there’s room for improvement. Likes, saves, shares and comments – you want to get those numbers up.

So, how do you create engaging content to gain more social media reach?

Choose your niche – specific content will stand out and attract the right people
Create a posting schedule for consistency
Know your audience. (It’s worth repeating.)

Your social media content is always being analyzed by the algorithms, and if your engagement is low, the algorithm determines that that piece of content isn’t very relevant. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, as of 2018 “ about 3 billion [internet users] were on social media. That’s a massive undertaking to monitor and manage. This is why algorithms are so crucial in determining the validity and placement of social media accounts and content.

These platforms don’t want to lose users’ engagement, so if you want to extend your reach, make it easy for the algorithm. Analyze which of your posts have been the most successful, and post more of that. Find out what’s been working for you or your competitors here. Another way to make engagement easier is to create collaborative content – let’s talk about it.

4. Work with influencers or other brands

You want your users to develop a relationship with your brand, and in the same way, you can develop brand and influencer relationships that drive engagement and social media reach. eMarketer says that“ Creators are becoming brands in their own right, and marketers should treat them as such. Think of creators as publishers: Focus on finding relevant audiences and building relationships.”

Find a complimentary service, a community, or an influencer that aligns with your brand, figure out what you have to offer, and reach out. If your potential partner agrees to collaborate, great. You just opened the door to their followers and built a bridge that can be mutually beneficial. Don’t be discouraged if your first choice doesn’t work out. There are plenty of fish in the influencer sea.

Here’s a great example of an inspirational post by Nike where they paired with world champion sprinter, Dina Asher-Smith. They’ve also tagged others involved with the production. In the end, the post is creative and encouraging, and it widens the reach of everyone involved.

5. Make your social media posts reachable

When you share social media content, it’s obvious that your followers have access, but to extend your reach, take advantage of the following:

Tagging
Locations
Hashtags

We’ve just mentioned collaborations, but you need to make sure the involved parties are credited if you want greater exposure. If your content was collaborative, you can tag the artists, influencers, photographers, etc. The same goes for brands that you’ve decided to work with.

Another function that can extend your social media reach is locations. If your post is location-specific, include it. People viewing that location’s landing page may just stumble upon your content and want to follow along.

Then there are hashtags. If your brand is in the early stages or you’d like to continue expanding, using hashtags on Instagram can increase your reach by 20x according to a case study conducted by NapoleanCat. Careful though – this can start to look spammy. Only use tags, hashtags, and locations relevant to your post and/or brand. You can choose a high traffic hashtag and then add another keyword to make it more specific and relevant. If you’re interested in learning more, here are some hashtag tips.

6. Don’t be afraid to try new things

Marketing is trial and error. Gathering data, getting to know your audience, and taking calculated risks are all major parts of extending social media reach. Spend a little time creating something new that you think users will like. Think videos, infographics, giveaways, contests, etc.

New trends are always popping up. If these new types of posts are well-made and used sparingly among tried and true content, this innovation may just attract a new community of engaged followers. If anything starts boosting social media engagement, add this new type of content to your rotation.

Conclusion

Make sure you’re meeting all of these requirements and watch your social media reach start to soar. Just make sure you’re spending enough time analyzing the data that comes in after a post.

Your audience has responded and that’s who you’re posting for, so use the feedback to strategically adjust future posts.

Third-party monitoring and analysis tools can be really helpful in analyzing data and determining what content is best for your brand.