When times are tough and budgets are tight, marketers must get creative. Here are some battle-tested organic social media tactics that you can use to dramatically increase brand popularity

Spend quality time on social media

* Connect with individuals in your target audience. Next, invite connections to follow your company page. Seems obvious, but I’ve helped companies gain hundreds of followers this way in weeks.

* Presenting at a conference? Reach out to all other presenters ahead of time and connect on social. Can they attend your session? Can they meet for coffee? (this will amplify your session and the jitters will be worth it).

Activate your team 

* Do all team members’ job titles link to your company page on LinkedIn? This way, they get alerts when a post is published, making it easy for them to re share. 

* Incentivize comments, shares and the tagging of relevant individuals on company posts with a gift card for the most engaged team member each month – this greatly amplifies post impressions (but may decrease productivity ;).

Develop engaging content for social media  

* Do you have thoughts on trending news? Identify these with trends.google.com and find a genuine tie in to your brand (e.g. Peloton Wife in the Aviation American Gin commercial…)

* Could you run a customer survey, or does your platform generate interesting data? (e.g. Match.com’s Singles in America or Orkin’s 50 worst bed bug cities report)

* Have a customer willing to share their experience? The higher-profile the customer, and the larger their network the bigger the impact you can expect

* Could you create a webinar? Before you skim past this one – I recently ran a webinar for a client that got 3K attendees and almost broke the webinar platform. The devil is in the details – you need great content that’s interesting to your audience. Consider bringing in a VC, a customer, or a partner to 2X reach and leads generated. Use effective, timely promotion tactics (see On24’s 2022 benchmark report for a how-to guide).     

Optimize your posts 

* Leverage the search box on LinkedIn to include relevant, popular hashtags so your post gets more impressions (e.g. #DigitalMarketing has 27M followers). 

* Videos earn 3X the engagement of text posts on LinkedIn. Consider this format for short customer testimonials, LinkedIn Lives or product demos. (Canva is a nifty app for video edits & image creation).

* Tag people and companies in your posts – this generates an alert to them and makes it more likely that they will engage.

Social media popularity is not just for the marketing-budget 1%. His wide-reaching network took Andy Warhol from an unknown to a global sensation, so take heart and let your social media presence reflect what your brand aspires to become.