Tools to Help Grow Your Social Media Audience

Jason Grad is a guest contributor for Nonprofit Hub, and Founder of Bstow. While working in Corporate Sales at Yelp and running Yelp Foundation, he witnessed ALS Ice Bucket Challenge incentivize donors to give to charity. From researching how to create incentives for donors and establish recurring revenue streams for nonprofits, he built Bstow—a round up app for charity.

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There are a myriad of products out there now for handling your social media following; many of them are bad, some of them are good and a precious few are indispensable. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Here are some tips and tricks for how to take advantage of the most useful platforms out there.

Crowdfire

Use this tool for straightforward audience growth on Twitter and Instagram. With the ‘Copy Followers’ feature, you can instantly follow the followers of brands that are similar to yours. By doing so, you are putting your brand in front of people that you already know are going to like what you do. If you have a nonprofit that helps animals, for example, this will help put you in front of people that follow other animal nonprofits. They’re likely to follow your brand back, and like your content, too.

crowdfire

Pro tip: Crowdfire is much better on mobile than desktop. You can follow/unfollow 100 per hour. Let the button-mashing begin!

Buffer

Buffer helps you schedule your Twitter content in advance. While Crowdfire will help you grow your audience by sheer volume of engagement, having great content will increase conversions. Content is valuable only if you provide the right people with the content; that will help you start a warm conversation. With Buffer, you can schedule content for multiple platforms and for different users.

buffer

Pro tip: Include an image in every post. Yes, every single one. Images drastically increase conversion.

Hashtagify.me

Not sure which tags are the most popular? Use this site to find out. By searching for tags related to your business, it will show you all related hashtags as well. Click around and write down the most popular tags (that are relevant to what you do) to implement in your posts.

hashtagify

Pro tip: This is a good baseline for scheduled content—but to really schedule great content you want to join conversations, rather than just start them. This means posting content that incorporates themes that are already trending.

Trends Tabs

Posting great content means joining existing conversations and being on trend.

It’s a lot easier to get exposure if people are already consuming the kind of content that you’re posting. We like to take current trends and find ways to make them relevant to our social impact initiatives. Twitter Trends can be found on the Home tab of the desktop site. Instagram also has an entire section dedicated to what’s currently trending.

trends

tswift

Pro Tip: Taylor Swift is really popular, pretty much at all times. Surprise!

Upwork

Want to have an amazing social presence but don’t have time to do it yourself? You can use Upwork to find freelancers from all over the world. I’d recommend using spreadsheets to create a system of checks and balances.

My virtual assistant helps out a lot with content and other random tasks that come up throughout the day that my team doesn’t have time to execute on.

upwork

Pro tip: Make sure that the potential hire is willing to have a video call with you first, and that their Internet connection and English proficiency are both good. Also, use small test jobs at first to help you hire smart.

Google Analytics

Smart marketing means knowing where your traffic is coming from. If you notice a certain channel is doing better for you than others, it might make sense to prioritize that channel or find out what you can do to optimize other channels. When you open up Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium to see what’s driving traffic the most.

google

Pro tip: Create conversion goals.

Cyfe

This is another tool that will pull in all of your analytics from different sources and show it in one beautiful graphical display. The amount of customization is incredible here.

This is the only non-free tool on this list, but you can find promo codes online that will cut it down to ~$10/month for unlimited users and unlimited dashboards.

cyfe

Pro Tip: There is a feature that lets you share your dashboard with someone for viewing only. This makes it really easy to update your team on all analytics without having to do anything other than click a button or two.

Now get out there and build your following! There’s no need to break the bank to do it.

social media tools
Eric-Burger

Jason Grad

February 2, 2016

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