As a business owner, you may be just starting out with social media marketing. You know the basics like how to create content and gain followers. While you do have a decent number of followers, you know that you could be doing more to reach them while gaining new ones.

Here are 4 ways to extend your reach on social media:

1. User-Generated Content
   Although they may not work for you, your followers on social media can be valuable to your social media marketing efforts. Along with sharing your content with their contacts, they can create content you can use to promote your product or service. 

   This content can benefit you in that over ¾ of consumers’ purchase decisions are influenced by reviews and other user-generated content related to products or services on social media. In a way, user-generated content is the modern version of word-of-mouth advertising. 

   Along with encouraging customers to leave reviews of products, you can engage with them in other ways to obtain user-generated content. For example, you can hold contests where followers share photos of themselves using your products or services. 

   You can also ask questions relevant to your brand on social media. Followers can respond to them and in turn, inform you about their thoughts regarding your brand that you can use to improve your offerings. 

2. Use Hashtags
   In social media posts, you can use hashtags to help users find your content in search results on the platform. Hashtags are phrases with the pound sign (#) before them. You can even use your brand name as a hashtag. An example of a branded hashtag for our agency would be #linkswebdesign. 

   However, you can also tie hashtags to events you’re participating in or create posts about. For example, if you’re donating a proceed of your profits to a charity for Giving Tuesday, a day where people and businesses commonly give to charity, you could add #givingtuesday to your post. You could also add a hashtag for the charity you’re donating to further expand your reach. 

3. Create Shareable Content
   While quality content matters, so does quantity. Especially when it comes to how frequently your content is viewed or shared. Whether it’s a video, blog, or social media post, content only shared once is usually only seen once. 

   Sharing updates more than once affects the number of clicks, views, and shares it receives. This doesn’t mean that you need to share the same content over and over again. Rather, you should be making high-quality content that your followers will share on social media. 

   That doesn’t mean you can’t share your own content. You can. However, you need to change the way that you display it. By this, we mean that you should present the content in different ways on different platforms. 

   For example, you could create a video based on a blog post. Then, you could share this video on social media. By doing this, you ensure that your content is distributed to your audience more widely. From there, they are more likely to share your content with their own contacts. 

4. Engage Your Employees
   Just because they don’t manage your social media accounts doesn’t mean that your employees can’t play a part in your social media marketing. In fact, they can play a fairly large role as content shared on social media by employees gets 8X more engagement than that shared by brand accounts. It’s only natural that people want to talk to other people rather than brands. 

   It is also one of the best ways to expand your reach on social media as your employees have their own contacts that will see and possibly even share any content they produce. To gain this benefit, encourage employees to share brand-related content on social media. With the right guidelines, they can be your greatest assets in your social media marketing efforts. 

   One way to engage employees is by encouraging them to use branded hashtags when posting content related to your brand. This can include photos from events like holiday parties, news relevant to employees like a promotion or an award. You can also create a Facebook group or similar forum on social media where employees can communicate with each other.

Want to Expand Your Reach on Social Media?
Social media can be a great way to engage potential customers, and build brand loyalty among existing customers. Like any other marketing activity, it takes time and effort to expand your reach among your target audience. It also requires you to build strong relationships.

If you’d like to expand your reach on social media or get started with social media marketing, we can help. Contact Links Web Design for a free consultation today. We’d be happy to help you meet your social media and other marketing goals.

Links Web Design is a social media marketing agency in Bangor, ME, and Fruitland Park, FL.