True social media success requires patience and hard work

True social media success requires patience and hard work

Earlier this month, while managing a client’s Twitter account, I noticed it had passed 20,000 followers.

I’ve managed this client’s Twitter account for over about 4 years, and when I took it over, it had under 100 followers. That means their Twitter followers had increased 20,519% during these 4 years. (They’ve since passed 21,000 followers.)

Why I focus on organic growth

As a social media manager, I specialize in building followers for my clients organically. While I’m happy to manage social media ad campaigns to increase followers and engagement, I never recommend them. In my experience, ad campaigns result in short-term growth only.

Organic growth is basically building followers and engagement over time through 3 ways:

  1. Content curation
  2. Content creation
  3. Participating in conversations

It takes longer (compared to paid followers, for example), but it results in higher quality followers who are more engaged.

As those followers increase, they engage more with your content, eventually building momentum and creating new followers for you. Followers created organically are the best kind of followers because they are committed to your brand. They are more likely to remain your followers and more likely to interact with your content.

The downside to organic growth is that it takes time, as long as several months. If you want immediate results, you’ll be disappointed with this practise. But if you want followers who will like, comment on, and reshare your social media content, then organic growth is the best kind of social media growth.

Not everyone agrees with me

Some people don’t agree with me. They want quick, explosive growth, and they think they can get it through ads. That can be effective if all you’re interested in is follower growth, but if you want engaged followers, you’ll be disappointed.

Buying social media followers or likes through advertising costs a lot of money and it isn’t sustainable. Most of those who react to your ads won’t be true fans of your brand, and in the long run will either ignore you or even stop following you. Unless you keep paying for advertising to gain new followers to replace the unengaged ones.

Organic growth is hard work

Organic growth takes work. Hard work. A lot of it. Plus it takes time. But anything worth having is worth working for.

Pump out quality content that people want to share and talk about, and you will increase your followers naturally. Organic growth is always the best policy.

I’ve been managing social media accounts for 9 years, and today, I manage corporate accounts with a combined following of over 100,000 followers. With that experience, I’ve seen organic growth work.

4 more examples of organic growth success

In fact, here are 4 other examples of the success I’ve seen focusing from using organic growth:

Are you interested in seeing this same success with your company’s social media accounts. Check out my social media modules, then drop me a line so we can discuss what I can do for you.

By Kim Siever

I am a copywriter and copyeditor. I blog on writing and social media tips mostly, but I sometimes throw in my thoughts about running a small business. Follow me on Twitter at @hotpepper.

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