In today’s modern world, so many of us have a digital footprint in some way or another. Whether it’s Facebook, Tik Tok, or Instagram, social media platforms are continuing to dominate our daily lives in a number of interesting ways! For any brand or influencer (that’s you!), growing your followers and building a social media presence is a huge part of your success.
Why Is It Important To Have A Social Media Presence?
According to Smart Insights, 57.6% of the world’s population use social media, and the average daily use clocks in at 2 hours and 27 minutes. That’s only the average, so imagine how many hours others are accruing on a daily basis! Younger generations are accessing the internet more than others, with some 76% of college graduates saying that they use social media at least once a day.
Useful Social Media Statistics
From connecting us with others across the globe to being a part of a history-making movement, social media has transformed mostly every aspect of our lives. Here are some useful social media stats worth knowing about!
- There are 4.2 billion people who use social media around the world.
- Social media platforms gained an additional 490 million users in 2020.
- 98.8% of people use social media via their phones.
How To Increase Your Followers And Establish Your Social Media Presence
1. Decide On Your Goals
Before you start tweeting or creating a new profile on Instagram or TikTok, consider your goals. What are you looking to achieve as a vaping influencer? Figure out your objectives and outline your personal goals.
For example, you may find that you want X amount of followers on one platform or you want to spend more time posting on another. Setting goals will give you a solid direction and help you stay on track!
2. Create An Eye-catching Profile
An engaging profile that showcases your personality has far more of a chance of keeping users on your page for longer. In the long run, this will greatly help with engagement and your follower count.
Consider where your eyes land when you visit a social media profile. Wherever they head to first should be the point at which you include a creative visual or text.
Each platform you sign up to should be an extension of your personality and should therefore be recognisable. Try including a witty bio to intrigue users to find out more - which leads us onto our next point!
3. Don't Neglect Your Bio
The bio in all of your social media profiles is vital as it’s often the first piece of text people will read. This short snippet about who you are will be read in a matter of seconds, which is enough time for someone to decide whether to follow you or not. On Instagram, you’ve only got 150 characters to play with, so ensure to make use of every last one!
It’s also important to incorporate key visuals (i.e your best selfie!) and any pieces of info that will be useful to the user in your bio section. A lot of influencers utilise this space to add keywords, hashtags and external links such as your personal blog.
4. Interact With Other Influencers And Your Followers
Most if not all social platforms now actively recommend similar profiles to yours, so you shouldn’t have trouble finding and following popular vaping influencers.
Don’t forget about your own followers, too! If you’re a micro influencer, you may want to send some of your followers a direct message to express your gratitude for their ongoing support.
The best way to keep up with all of this is to allocate a set amount of time each day to focus solely on interactions. Interacting with your followers can be as simple as liking their posts or comments from time to time. More on this below!
5. Respond To Your Followers' Comments
People love to feel directly involved with influencers and appreciated by them. After all, it’s only human nature to want to be a part of a tribe!
By interacting and responding to the majority of your followers’ comments, you’ll come across as more personable rather than robotic to others.
Eventually, with enough interactions that are easily visible on your page, you’ll have a community of loyal followers who love and support your content. The bottom line? The more you can interact with your customers on your social channels, the better!
6. Connect All Of Your Social Media Platforms
The vaping community is across many different platforms. In fact, studies show that the average social media user engages with 6.6 social media channels.
To further increase your follower count, we recommend connecting your social media channels together and cross-promoting them where you can. Linktree is a great way to keep all of your social channel links in one place. You can then add this link to each of your social bios - it’s as easy as that! Even if you’re not as active on certain channels, it’s certainly worth doing if you’ve got time.
7. Use Hashtags and Geolocation Tags
Hashtags are a communicative phenomenon unique to the internet. While they were first introduced on Twitter in 2007 by Chris Messina, they’re now more relevant than ever.
Within each post you make, always remember to use relevant hashtags. To save time, you may want to take inspiration from other vape influencers and include theirs, or use hashtag generators.
However, it’s vital to include hashtags applicable to the product and brand that you’re promoting. A few places to start for hashtag research are Kicksta, Inflact and Tailwind.
Another useful tip is to use geolocation tags to show your followers the venue or location you’re in at the time of posting. This way, more people will be able to find your page while they’re exploring other posts in this location!
We also always advise adding #ad or #sponsored hashtags in every post you make for us. For best practices, please refer to your chosen social media platform’s specific regulations.
8. Leverage More Platforms
Social media management can take up a lot of your time, so the idea of leveraging even more platforms than you have now may sound like a real challenge. However, making an account on multiple platforms is an effective way to reach a wider audience.
Being active on more than one social channel will enable your followers to connect with you in a way that’s most convenient to them. For example, some of your followers may prefer video content to image content and so will choose TikTok over Instagram to discover all of the latest vape products and trends.
9. Host Mini Competitions and Giveaways
Who doesn’t love an opportunity to win something for free? We do, especially when it’s vape goodies! Online giveaways are popping up here, there and everywhere nowadays. So, if you can spare a few unused freebies from your own vape collection, why not host a small competition too?
This can be an extremely useful way to boost your following and build your reputation as an influencer. Simply ask your followers to follow your account and like the post to enter, or go further by asking them to comment and tag a friend. You may even wish to add an extra entry to drive further engagement, such as sharing the post on their story.
10. Optimise Content Through Keywords
Keywords are crucial in helping your social media posts be seen by your target audience. So, in order to find out what your audience is really searching for, it can be useful to conduct keyword research. In turn, you’ll be able to tailor your content to fit the expectations of your followers.
There are plenty of different platforms that you can use for keyword research. A couple of these include Moz and Google. Without using keyword stuffing in your posts, think about how your content can fit the keywords that you’ve researched. As always, remember to embed appropriate hashtags in your content!
11. Post Regularly and Stay Consistent
The amount of content you publish within the timeframe of a day, week and month all influences your overall engagement. If you’re posting quite sparingly and inconsistently, you won’t be able to get much traction on your posts.
Following a posting schedule and uploading regularly will give your current followers something to look forward to. Take this for example: if you publish every day in the evening, your users will be expecting it and therefore actively looking on your profile to engage with your new post!
Plus, it’s great to know that posting consistently helps with each social media platform’s individual algorithm, a complex compilation of data and rules that is unique for every social media user.
There are an array of platforms that can help you stay on top of your content scheduling, such as Agorapulse. By using social media planning platforms, you’ll be able to easily plan out your content day by day, week by week and month by month, all without hassle!
12. Be Authentic!
While social media can be a super place, it can also be extremely superficial. Far too often, we see photoshopped images of celebrities and unauthentic posts asking for likes.
We’ve all been there - scrolling through Instagram and coming across a glaringly obvious paid post. The tone is off, the content seems rushed, and you can see through their unnatural smile that they don’t want anything to do with the product they’ve been asked to promote.
Whenever you post content, just remember one simple rule: be yourself! Just like real life, social media users more often than not want to follow people who are relatable, approachable, and above all, inspirational.
Stray away from posting generic content and focus on building a profile and image that people will instantly recognise as authentically you. For example, you may want to stay with a certain theme on your profile or use the same colours and typography within the majority of your content. Most importantly, remember to let your personality shine through with each post!
13. Identify The Best Times For Interactions and Posting
Social media users tend to be the most active in between the commuting hours of 8-10am and 5-7pm. However, this isn’t the case for every single platform, and of course, not all of your followers will be in the same time zone. This is why it’s worth finding out where the majority of your audience is based.
You can do this by setting your account to a business page. From here, you’ll be able to see insights for your profile, including an overview of when your followers are most active
14. Keep An Eye On Your Competition
Remember earlier when we said to follow other influencers? There’s a reason why we said this - it’s one of the best ways to stay on top of your competitors, i.e similar pages to you!
Staying in your lane is one thing but you’ll also need to be aware of what’s happening in other lanes. In other words, by keeping tabs on similar pages, you’ll be able to see how their content is performing. When you get time, have a look at what’s working for them and perhaps take some inspiration for your future posts!
You don’t need to stay laser-focused on what other pages are doing, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to them whatsoever.
15. Try Live Streaming
We’re living in a fast-paced 24/7 world where people want to see exciting things happening in real time.
Live streaming has become a very popular form of media across all social channels. So much so that nearly every social media platform now has a free live streaming function accessible to all.
For any influencer, live streaming can be a fantastic way to introduce yourself and get to know your followers at the same time. As people outside of your follower list can also join, live streaming can be an equally valuable way to connect with even more people.
16. Stay In The Loop Of Trending Topics
There’s always something trending on social media! To help you easily discover what everyone’s talking about, most social media channels have a handy feature which shows what’s currently trending on the platform.
For example, Twitter has a trending section on the homepage which displays popular hashtags, keywords and posts. Alongside showing wider global trends, Twitter allows you to tailor this feed to your personal interests. These insights can be hugely helpful in generating content that you can adapt to trends.
Many influencers have gone viral for their take on trending topics, so it’s definitely worth looking into. Trends change every single day, so make sure to keep well in the know of what’s happening.
17. Post Behind-The-Scenes Content
Believe it or not, most influencer followers LOVE seeing backstage content via features like stories and platforms like Snapchat. Yep, we’re talking about product unboxing, your dog, what you cooked for dinner, and all of that great stuff!
This type of content has skyrocketed across all channels, with the likes of TikTok most notably being proof of this. If you’re already an avid user of this platform, you may have already come across brands and influencers who have posted videos following this “Day In The Life” concept.
18. Monitor Your Analytics
Analytics can tell you a lot about how your social media accounts are performing, both individually and as a whole. There are several different tools out there that can track mentions, aka who is talking about you online.
This can be extremely useful for your page in terms of seeing what is and what’s not working with your posts, helping you generate better content moving forward. These tools can also tell you which platforms you should be giving more focus to.
19. Reuse Evergreen Content
Where you can, try to recycle your evergreen content. This is content that can stay contextually relevant overtime, and performs fantastically with each post. On each platform, choose your most engaging content and create something similar in the caption so you can get the same interactions as before.
20. Don't Become Complacent
Picture this: you’ve landed 500 followers on Instagram overnight after a hugely successful post. You wake up grinning ear to ear, blown away by the response. You then put your phone down and don’t engage with your followers for a whole week. The next time you check your profile, your follower count has dropped by 250.
The moral of the story here is to not become too complacent. Growing your social channels and thriving as a creative requires daily attention, and should be seen as a work in progress.
This doesn’t mean you need to stay glued to your phone during all hours of the day, but to be successful, you’ll need to put in the work. Trust us, each and every interaction you make with your followers is sure to pay off in the long run!
So, there you have it! You’re now ready to get out there and make people remember your name. We hope you’ve found this guide helpful, and remember: be yourself!
