When you hear the term “audience growth,” it’s easy to assume we’re talking hard numbers or simply just a number of followers. But in reality, it’s so much more than that. In today’s ever-growing sea of social media messaging, brands are fighting for 5 seconds of attention, or even less. So there’s a diligent strategy in place around how we attract and maintain a fanbase.
It wasn’t always this way, I came up working in social media just as brands were discovering the values it could provide. In those days, we could have 100% organic reach. In those days, you could also only get into the back end of a brand’s Facebook through your own personal account. Needless to say, those days are ancient history.
Developing an audience and growing one is a hypothesis-driven dance, but a particularly fun one—especially when everything works as planned.
As algorithms changed, paid media came to play, and the rules shifted, so too did the mindset around what audience growth means at a fundamental level. As Movement Strategy’s Strategy Director, data drives everything I do. My job is to find the stories our qualitative and quantitative data tell us in order to build a framework to create within.
Developing an audience and growing one is a hypothesis-driven dance, but a particularly fun one—especially when everything works as planned.
Strategize, test, measure, optimize. Repeat.
I always start by mapping the Social Consumer Journey. Establishing how we want the consumer to behave and then filling in all the ways we can use the tools at our disposal to make that behavior reality. This serves as the framework from which we set all of our goals and institute KPIs and benchmarks to measure how close we are to achieving our ideal journey. This is also the impetus for content creation, asking ourselves: what role does each individual piece of content play? What is most crucial here is that we start by trying to understand our customers’ mindset. Only when we have done this can we really grow.
Once these strategic frameworks are established, it’s a constant cycle: research, strategize, post content, pull the numbers, measure performance against goals, stay on top of what’s trending, track consumer behaviors. Then, do it all over again, but better.
Never stop researching
A large part of growing your audience is genuinely understanding them, so I am constantly researching. Yes, this includes an analysis of data points, raw numbers and performance metrics, but it also includes staying abreast of what’s trending and tracking consumer behaviors across demographics. Social media thrives on cultural clout and establishing influence and authority through trust, consistency, and personalization.
Social media thrives on cultural clout and establishing influence and authority through trust, consistency, and personalization.
Given how quickly and drastically consumer behavior can change, especially during such unprecedented times, it’s vital to consistently infuse these audience insights and pop trends into our always-on content creation process, not just those big brand strategy moments. The goal is to deepen relationships with the brand, proving through actions, not just words, that we are worthy of their time and attention.
Create a social persona
Knowing who your audience is and how you want them to behave is just the beginning of growing your audience. Next is putting the foundation work into practice and asking: how does this come to life? As the day-to-day personifiers of brands, it’s our goal to help audiences connect with our brands through the use of a strong persona. What are their values? What do they stand for or believe in? What is their voice? We aim to answer these questions at every interaction, defining all of this as a social persona.
We strive to create an environment in which social media users want to engage with us, through the exceptional work done by our Creative, Content, and Communication teams. My job is to understand the meaning of the audience’s relationship to the brand and to the persona we’ve built. When all of these pieces fit into place, that’s the sweet spot for organic growth.
Support organic through paid
There’s still opportunity to grow organically, especially within certain verticals like entertainment or brands with high name recognition, but 9 times out of 10, you’re going to need paid support. Luckily, paid media can provide the boosts (pun intended) we need. Understanding the inner workings of how paid can play off of organic, and vice versa, can be the key to audience growth on social.
It’s vitally important for strategists and creatives to work hand in hand with their paid media teams. I’m always asking paid teams about how we’re targeting, how segments are responding to different objectives, creative variations, and messaging.
Understanding how all of these things work together in service of building those deeper relationships with the audience and a really engaged consumer base is what will eventually grow an audience.
We see this in practice all of the time. For example, our client Klarna had a channel growth rate of about 3% per month before we launched a paid boost strategy. Since that launch, we’ve grown at an average rate of 6% per month which isn’t a direct correlation to the paid spend, rather the interplay of how the organic and paid initiatives work together helping both be greater than the sum of their parts.
Know what success looks like
There are many metrics brands and clients focus on. Vanity metrics, for lack of a better term, are your followers, rudimentary growth data points, and the ever-present like. Even calling them vanity metrics sort of belittles them. While they might not give us, as strategists, exact directions for how to deepen relationships to our audience, they’re still important. For one, they’re vital directional data points for executives who may not have deep social media experience. And if those executives are trying to get investors and funding, for example, these numbers are incredibly valuable because they can tangibly affect the business. Two, they provide social proof. If an account has a strong following, there can be a snowball effect, akin to: “Oh, this account has 2.1 million followers, I need to follow them!”
These metrics are not to be discarded or belittled even though my goal is always building audience relationship with a brand, even if that may mean growth is slower initially. A smaller audience could still mean a more ardent fan base who will in turn help produce earned growth.
The more profoundly engaged and passionate our audience base is, the more likely they are to take action on behalf of the brand
Engagement metrics, meanwhile, help me understand how passionate and connected an audience is. The standard data point here is engagement rate, but really it’s much more than that. Are we getting comments, saves, and shares in addition to likes? Are people watching videos to the end, and are they rewatching? What’s being said in the comments? Which behavior is most indicative of how audiences feel about the content they’re seeing and the brand they are seeing it from? These are the metrics we use to optimize for the behavior we want to replicate. This is how we know what sort of audience we have and where we know we can push further, bringing them deeper into the worlds that we create.
The more profoundly engaged and passionate our audience base is, the more likely they are to take action on behalf of the brand, whether that’s buying a product, using a service, or spreading a message. The journey is always cyclical, it’s a pathway to advocacy, amplifying the brands we’ve built, leading to word of mouth discovery, and ultimately not only audience growth but brand growth as well.
