Community is always at the heart of authentic, impactful social media marketing for businesses and nonprofits. As a Chamber member, we can support each other on social media and help each other grow our accounts. One of the effective things we do is to leverage the algorithms that each social media platform uses to widen reach and have every post perform better.

You may be wondering - what are these algorithms and how do they work? According to Later.com, based on information about you, your activity on the platform and the poster, “Instagram’s algorithm calculates how likely someone is to interact with a post, known as a score of interest, which ultimately determines the order in which posts are displayed in their feed.”

Below are 5 important interactions that factor into the way the algorithm figures out what content your supporters and fellow Chamber members will see. Doing these simple things when scrolling on your business’s account feed will ensure that you are not only supporting your community, but you will be getting that support in return!

1. Follow your fellow members and local businesses/community partners. You can find their handles by googling them, looking them up on the platform itself or going to their website. (Pro Tip: Did you know you can add your social media handles to your profile page on the Chamber website?) These accounts should in return follow you back and start to engage with your posts!

2. Every time you log on, you should comment on the last 10 engaging posts in your feed. You should be spending 5-10 minutes per day engaging with the accounts you are following. When you see a post you like or from someone you'd like do business with, you can:

• Like it
• Comment on it
• Share it to your Instagram Stories
• Tap on their profile to see what else they have posted and what their bio says about them. This is an important one! Once you read their bio, you will be more familiar with what they do and you can refer them easier!
• Save (bookmark) the post to keep for later

3. Include a Call to Action (CTA) on all or most of your posts so your audience knows how to engage with you! Some examples of CTAs are adding one of the following to your caption or post:

• “Tag a friend who needs to know about this”
• “Comment below”
• “Click the link in our bio”
• “What do you think about this…?”
• “What do you do when…?”
• “How do you deal with…?”

4. Add hashtags to your posts or in the first comment session. This will expand the reach of your post beyond your current audience and ensure new people are seeing your content. (There are 3 kinds of hashtags to think about: branded, industry/community hashtags and geographical, play around with those and you will expand your reach!)

5. Tag the Chamber every time you post in the caption or on the (Instagram) photo so the Chamber can share your posts to their stories. This enlarges your post’s reach and also creates content for the Chamber! It’s a Win/Win. You should also tag other accounts you want to know about a particular post and you should create a tagging strategy for each post.

Some of these thoughts are specific to Instagram, but may be applied to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as well! We’d love to hear from you on what platform you are looking to build your audience so we can make sure to support you where you need it most!

 

Jessica founded Red Root Marketing 9 years ago in response to a need she observed in the local business communities of northern New Jersey. Small business owners needed help connecting to their customers, prospects and communities to expand their brand awareness and to get support. Jessica was able to develop a social media marketing approach, rooted deeply in creating community connections, that allowed her to bring awareness to these local businesses in an efficient and effective manner through grassroots and hyperlocal techniques. 

Jessica grew up in Wisconsin, lived in France for 6 years and has been on the East Coast with her family for over 20 years. In Paris, Jessica was Quality Control Manager in a business language school and quickly learned how to market the courses being taught by over 70 teachers to C-Suite executives. Leveraging that skill on the local level in New Jersey, Jessica became event coordinator at The Fine Grind Coffee Bar where she orchestrated a full-scale guerrilla marketing campaign, which led her to connect with other local businesses as a Marketing and Social Media consultant.