How to Grow a Social Media Following From Nothing 

Est. reading time: 36 minutes

​matthew barby

There are thousands of articles that have been written about ways to grow your social media following (some of which by myself), but one of the things that most articles fail to cater for is actually growing them from nothing.

We all know how Coca Cola, Pepsi and Oreo have built enormous social media followings, but what if you’re not a huge brand? How about if you’ve just set up a blog and had no real online presence beforehand?

This is what I’m going to focus on – the first 3-4 months of your social media campaign.

Keep Focused
One thing to mention before I get started is that it’s really easy to get disheartened during the early stages of your social media campaigns. Things are slow at the beginning and it can feel like you’re running in circles a lot of the time.

The reality is that most social media campaigns won’t really deliver any real results until you’ve got a fair few months into them. Even then, depending on what niche you’re in, it can take much longer. The most important thing to remember is to keep focused.

Have a strategy and stick to it – even if it feels like you’re going nowhere.

I’m going to use a real example within this post so that it’s not just a load of theory. The example will be my new food blog, Pescetarian Kitchen (if you didn’t know already, I’m a huge foodie!).

The food blog has been running for 5 months now and I’ve already had some fantastic results from the social media campaign, so this will be a perfect example to show alongside all the points I make.
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Here are the results I’ve had so far: 

• 4,700+ Facebook followers
• 850 Twitter followers
• 515 Pinterest followers
• 550 email subscribers (double opt-in)
• 15,000+ unique visitors from social media alone

No fluff, just results-driven advice (as always).
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Oh, and the final note I’ll make is that I haven’t spent a fortune either. My maximum monthly budget for the social media campaign is £80, so this will apply to bloggers of all budgets (you can just scale up or down where necessary). 

Starting from 0

So you’ve just set up your blog. You have a new website and you’ve finally managed to get your custom email address to work. You’re all ready to start making waves online and it’s time to hit your first million likes on Facebook.

Baby steps…
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First, you need to decide on which social networks are going to be right for your content.
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Choosing the Right Channels

This is a really important decision because the last thing you want to do is dedicate a load of time, effort and resources (and money) into growing a social following within a specific channel, only to then find out that it’s not delivering the right results.

The main thing to consider is who your target market is and what type of content you’ll be producing.

Contrary to what many people say, there isn’t really a right or a wrong answer here. I’ve seen tons of examples of brands and blogs that carve out engaged audiences within unlikely social networks – it’s all about how you deliver your content to the audience you’re targeting.

With the example of my food blog, I knew that the imagery within the recipes would be a huge determiner of its success. With this in mind, I wanted to choose social channels that would play to the strengths of my content. At the same time, I didn’t want choose too many channels as this could spread my time too thin.

The primary channels that I chose were:

• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Twitter

The main objective of the social campaign was to drive back targeted traffic through to my recipes. Within these three channels, I felt I had the best possible chance. 

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