Let’s build an audience and spread brand awareness online
When building or refreshing your social media presence, it's important not to spread yourself too thin. Choose the platforms where your ideal customers will be and focus there before trying to expand to other platforms. If your ideal customer is older, stick to Facebook. If they're younger or in a more modern niche like gaming, try Twitter(X). If they're women/more female aligned, go with Pinterest. Instagram and TikTok are safe for pretty much everyone, and LinkedIn is good for B2B businesses.
When you've decided which platforms to start with, make sure your profile on each platform is consistent. Using the same profile pictures, bios, and handles improve brand recognition and allow customers to find you easily. You can also link profiles so that followers on your Instagram can easily find you on Twitter, as an example. Some platforms link to others really easily (Instagram integrates with TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest really well), so make sure you take advantage of that. You can also create a web page to add multiple links to your Instagram bio with all your social media accounts.
If you want to be found by former and potential customers, you need to optimize your profile. On each platform, certain parts of your profile are searchable. On Instagram, your name can be searched, so make sure to use your business name and niche as your "name". On Facebook and Twitter, your name and content is searchable, so follow the same SEO guidelines you would for your website, using keywords in your posts and tweets to be easily found by potential customers. Also, your bios need to be clear and describe what your business does in a concise way to encourage the people who find your account to follow you.
Now that your accounts are optimized and consistent, you need content for those accounts. The good thing is, making consistent content can actually be easier than making inconsistent content. The key is re-purposing. You can film a video about your products or services and post it on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Then you can transcribe that video into a blog post (that you create a graphic for and pin on Pinterest), boil down the key points for a few tweets, and use those same key points to make infographics for Instagram. This ensures consistent and valuable content that doesn't take up all your time.
Hashtags are a blessing and a curse. They can be so helpful for growing an account, but only if used correctly. Doing so takes a lot of research (or a professional). However, if you're going to do it on your own, here are some tips. Research hashtags related to your business with less than 10k posts. If you use a popular hashtag like #cute and you have less than 1000 followers, you're never going to show up on that hashtag page. The key is finding small hashtags with communities and followings to ensure people see your content.
As time has gone on, a lot of platforms rely less on hashtags and simply on keywords, so try to include keywords in your content, adding closed captioning to your videos to ensure that the algorithms send your content to the right people.
A lot of people make the mistake of trying to gain followers by "chasing". This includes following people and unfollowing them later, joining "engagement rings" (groups that like and comment on each other's posts to drive up engagement), etc. This may get you followers but if your goal is to make sales, vanity metrics mean nothing. You want to produce quality content that people value, and you'll draw in followers that genuinely enjoy your content and may consider buying from you in the future. Your growth may be slow, but with followers on a business account, quality is way better than quantity.