This is why growing your audience feels so HARD in 2022

Have you ever felt like growing your audience in 2022 is a little more challenging than it was a few years ago? Don’t worry! You are not alone.

 Building a strong, engaged audience can be difficult - you only have mere moments to attract someone to a post, have them hang out on your profile and convince them to hit the follow, like or subscribe button. There are so many factors that can contribute to whether or not someone decides to join your audience. 

 In this article, I'm sharing exactly why growing your audience in 2022 can feel like an uphill battle. Here are some of the common reasons why you may not see growth.

• You Come Off as Spammy

You think flooding your follower’s feed with your posts looks like you being active. But your followers may have another word to describe what you’re sharing: spam. Of course, you would never spam your audiences on purpose. But what if you’re guilty of accidental spam?

No one likes spammy accounts, so take a long look at yours to determine how spammy you may be coming off.

For example:

You post the same message over and over

Your posts are too "sales-y" or “pushy”

Your captions are all hashtags

 If you are doing those stated above, quit it and stop spamming your audience. 

Quit focusing solely on promotional posts

Avoid repeating posts endlessly

Cut out the unnecessary hashtags

• You Aren’t Being Social

People follow who they trust. If you aren’t having actual conversations with people on social media, you aren’t being social. Clearly, if you are automating everything, you CANNOT be social. Without showing up and talking to other people, you will not grow your social following.

Automation is great but you need to have real and actual live conversations. You must be social.

Life would be wonderful if we could just step back and automate everything…but then we wouldn’t really make connections or increase engagement and so our audience. 

Reply personally to people who comment on your posts.

When you follow someone, check out their profile and comment to their posts that may interest you. 

Instead of just dropping links on your Facebook or Instagram account, go live and answer questions or engage with your fans at least once every week. 

• You are not focused.

One of the reasons your audience isn’t growing is that you are trying to do many things all at once. You are on five platforms, trying to manage all of them at the same time.

Each platform has its quirks, social media audience, and best practices for how often to post. 

I’ve seen people often having one post from a social platform automatically post to all their social networks. They’re using scheduling tools to automate their posts. So if I’m following someone on Instagram, I might see their post there first. Then I see it on their Facebook page. Then I see it on Twitter. Then I see it on their Facebook profile. It looks spammy to me. 

My best advice is to choose 1 or 2 platforms you like where your ideal people also hang out. Then rock it! 

• Consider Best Time to Post on Social Media

You’ve likely looked at the best time to post on social media studies to come up with several posting times for your brand. I know I have. It’s still very much important to post during peak times.

Even with social media algorithms, it’s important to get engagement within the first few hours of posting so that the algorithms will show your posts to more of your audience –and finding the correct times to post for your brand can help with that.

While posting at peak engagement times is a go-to strategy, a detailed analysis of your audience might reveal less busy times when your specific audience is active, but competitors are not. There are tools that can help you dig into your own analytics.

• You’re not showing you’re true self or personality.

People can smell fake. And what happens when they do? They flee. Show some personality. Don’t be a commercial. No one wants to sign up for a commercial.

So, how can you improve the number of loyal audiences? Understanding your audience is indeed challenging and this is why most small businesses don’t like wasting their resources on it. The rule is simple, the more you know your audience, the better.  if you have no clue of your audience, starting might be easy but growing your startup will become a lifelong challenge.

 Nikki  Milne www.nikkimilne.com