Anyone who is anybody is online in this day and age, and it’s not unusual to have a large online presence – even if you’re not running a business.
However, for obvious reasons, your business will benefit from establishing a reputable online presence, and it’s important for you to invest your time into making sure you’re building up the right kind of following.
Unfortunately, building up a solid following online takes more than sharing a few videos and hoping for the best. So, check out this guide on how to establish a reputable online presence for your business.
How To Establish A Reputable Online Presence For Your Business
1. Interact with your followers
The idea of having thousands of followers that cling onto your every word is a little misguided. Unless you’re Kim Kardashian (and let’s face it if you are, it’s unlikely that you’re looking for tips on your online presence), then you’ll need to earn the respect of your followers.
Interact with them by commenting on their content, replying to their questions, and making sure that they feel valued as a follower and a customer of your business. For platforms such as Instagram, mentioning your followers in your stories can really help build up loyalty.
The great thing about Instagram stories is that you can have a little fun with them because they’re only available for 24 hours, which means that mentioning your followers or re-gramming some of their content will help build up your online presence.
Just remember to keep your stories relevant to what your business is trying to sell.
2. Don’t concentrate on the numbers
A huge mistake that many people make when they’re looking at trying to build their online presence is looking at the numbers involved such as follower count or page views.
While the thought of having a tonne of followers and loads of page views isn’t completely out of the question, you should be concentrating on the people who are already following you, not the ones you’re craving.
Popularity and success don’t always come from numbers because you could have a large following, but only have a small percentage of those followers interacting with you and actually interested in your content.
Much like this twitter account, you shouldn’t concentrate on the number of people that are following you. Instead, focus on who already is and make sure that you’re following the right people too.
3. Be as active as possible
Trends on the world wide web move fast and if you’re going to create an online presence worth mentioning, you’ll need to make sure that you’re online as much as possible.
It’s understandable that if you’re running a business then you might not have time to sit around checking your Facebook all day. However, missing out on a viral trend can lose valuable followers and cause your presence to fall into the background.
Not only that, due to social media algorithms, you will need to post online regularly to make sure that your content is seen by your target audience. Think about how many social media posts are created each day then compare it to the post you made a few days ago about your new products – it’s going to become lost in the abyss!
Be as active as possible so that you’re not forgotten about.
4. Use social media scheduling
We understand that you can’t always be sat on social media making sure that your posts go live when you need them to, and that’s where social media scheduling comes in. It’s a fantastic way of making sure that your content is seen without the need of being stuck to your computer desk all day.
Schedulers like Crowdfire will not only post to multiple social media platforms when you tell it to, but it will also help grow your following too by encouraging you to share relevant content from like-minded people. If you’re serious about growing your online presence, it might be worth investing in a premium service from your social media scheduler to gain full benefits.
5. Use SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is imperative when it comes to building a reputable online presence. To put it simply, without SEO you cannot expect people to stumble across your business profiles, and that includes your website too!
Learn and practice SEO within your content and also your social media posts to get yourself noticed even more. Research keywords for your industry so that you can incorporate them into your online world.
You should also do hashtag research for your social media following too. With most platforms you can use a plethora of different hashtags to pique the attention of potential followers, so do some research and find out which hashtags work best for your industry!
6. Run competitions and giveaways!
A great way of making your follower count numbers rise is by offering people something for nothing, and a great way to do this is by running competitions and giveaways. Perhaps you’ve got a new product you want to upsell – run a competition for one of your followers to win it!
This encourages sharing, conversation, and overall online growth for your business. Just remember to abide by rules and regulations on social media when asking for a follow/share/like. A great way to run a competition is by directing people to your website.
That way, not only do people have the chance to take part in something for nothing, but you’ll also gain traffic to your website too! If you’re not sure how to run a competition from your website, you could use Rafflecopter to make the process as simple as possible for all parties involved.
7. Don’t publish for the sake of it
Finally, while it’s important to be active online and post as much as possible, it’s important not to publish just for the sake of it too. Content that isn’t relevant or needed will be overlooked and will lose followers.
Keep your content relevant and informative, communicate with your followers, and integrate SEO and researched hashtags and over time, you’ll notice your online presence growing.