Imagine: you have finally set up your business; a dream company with full-time staff, a healthy income and an exciting potential for growth stretching out before you. The next step is engaging and growing your customer base and get your name out there. Advertising and marketing is a pricey and difficult world to get mixed up in so you turn to social media to get eyeballs on your brand. Setting up accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are quick and simple but you are yet to see any real engagement online.

What happens if social media isn’t giving you the results you were expecting?

Don’t panic. Success on social platforms is a quirky, unpredictable endeavour that can have you tearing your hair out with frustration, unless you have some simple ways to consistently boost your social media following and bring traffic to your company.

Luckily for you, we have some tips to help you on your way.

1: Ask and you shall receive

One of he best ways to get people to engage with you is to see other people already engaging with you. A catch-22 situation that can be tricky to overcome, letting potential customers and partners see that you are active and that people actually want to use your business is one of the best ways to bring in a new buyer.

Humans require assurance from someone else who had a positive experience in order to feel comfortable parting with their hard-earned cash and if you can show on your social media that you can give a positive customer experience online with proven cases willing to endorse you, you will see your ‘Follower’ number rising steadily.

How to do this

Facebook – Ask customers to give your business Facebook account a review and engage with your posts, either by sharing or commenting and liking what you post. You’d be surprised at how many people are willing to help you in this way if you give them good customer service

Twitter – Twitter allows you to pin tweets to the top of your feed which can be really handy if you are selling a particular promotion or product during that time. If, however, you don’t have a particular sale going on at that time, ask your followers to tweet you with their favourite thing about your business and pin those tweets to the top of your feed. If nothing else, it will give you an ego boost and brighten your day when you scroll past.

LinkedIn – The social media for businesses and professionals, LinkedIn has one of the best ways to show off your best customer reviews with their endorsements section. This allows other users to endorse your skills and attributes in a visually friendly voting system. If your product is cloud solutions, having hundreds of connections endorse you for your solution is a great way to show you’re an expert in the field and are trustworthy.

Instagram – Slightly more tricky, Instagram doesn’t give you an endorsement option but simple comments can still go a long way to making your company look better to potential customers.

2: Building a web of accounts

It’s no good having just a Facebook account if you are trying to bring in new followers to your brand. Having a network of accounts across all social platforms is extremely important to success online.

Apps like Hootsuite allow you to copy the same content across all your platforms at the same time to maximise impact and keep it all consistent the whole way through the process.

The key is to then make sure that all your accounts are linked together. Include hyperlinks to your Facebook and LinkedIn in your Twitter and Instagram bios, share a post or picture of a particularly well-performing post from Facebook across the other platforms to sing your praises and direct traffic to other outlets for your brand.

3: Engage with games

Engagement, by definition, requires a level of interaction with your posts. It’s all well and good getting eyes on your posts but if they are not actually interacting with your business and clicking on your links then it is largely wasted. Encouraging discussion and debate is a good way to generate buzz but you should be wary because you are not in control of what is said on the comments.

To combat this, many social media platforms allow you to set up polls, games and giveaways that can give you valuable data about who is clicking on your links and why, as well as encouraging them to actually engage with your posts and get involved with your accounts.

How to do it

Across all platforms, setting up a giveaway is really simple and an excellent opportunity to collect some useful data on who is clicking through and how to attract others. You can then use these giveaway opportunities alongside our previous tip by pinning the tweet/post to the top of your feed for the best chance to get people to look at your post.

Twitter – Twitter polls are really quick to set up and are really useful to gauge your audience. It is also an opportunity to have a bit of fun and try to find quirky, current or useful topics to generate discussion and engage with your followers.

Simply creating a post or picture on your social media with a link telling your followers about a new competition or giveaway will be a surefire way to bring in new followers to your business.

See also: 6 ways you can use social media as a tool for your business – Social media can be a business boon or bane, depending on whether you know how to use it. Opus Energy’s Lynn Morrison outlines six ways to make the most of these networks.