Want to increase your social media audience by 1,000 percent?
When I joined the staff of Big Cat Country back in 2013 (the abandoned alley of SB Nation that covers the Jacksonville Jaguars) they had about 9,000 subscribers across all their social media platforms.
Today, it has nearly 100,000 followers — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, email newsletters, and more.
How did I do that? Proprietary technology? Content bots? Some magic algorithm?
Nope. I just made a lot of mistakes while keeping things interesting.
This is what @BigCatCountry tweets looked like before I took over:
These were auto-generated, text-only tweets coming from our content management system — if you wrote an article and clicked a box before hitting “publish” it would push out a link to Twitter.
But it wasn’t very effective in getting readers.
If you want engagement, you need an audience. And if you want an audience, you have to be interesting. You need to tweet like there’s an actual human being behind the account — get into conversations, be funny (or try to), embed GIFs and videos, and keep an eye out for what’s going to connect to the audience you’re trying to reach.
Those four tweets have a combined audience of over 1 million impressions. Absolutely free. No paid or promoted tweets. Just years of building an audience through (hopefully!) good content.
And that’s the thing… you don’t just get an audience overnight. You have to spend time building trust, loyalty, and respect — because believe it or not following someone on Twitter is an investment and if it doesn’t pay off quickly and over a sustained period of time you’ll be unfollowed and you’ll likely never get that person back ever again. (I mean, how many times have you unfollowed or blocked an account and then re-followed and re-engaged with them? It doesn’t happen often.)
But social media isn’t just about branding and impressions. The end goal at Big Cat Country is to get people to click on articles and read our coverage.
In 2019, Big Cat Country garnered over 10 million page views. More than 2.4 million of those clicks came from social media.
That’s nearly 25% of our traffic — every single day — coming from social media.
The average? Less than 5% according to this SearchEngineLand study.
Doing well on social media gets you more than just a viral tweet now and then — it gets you an increasing number of clicks from quality users funneled directly to your website.
If you want help with your social media — ranging from consulting to full on management — contact me today.
