Social media consultant Anna Rump, of Amelia Rose Media offers five top tips to build relationships with your followers.

If you struggle with engagement on social media, then here are five top tips to help you build relationships with your followers. These can be used across any platform – LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – and include posting, commenting, responding, liking and searching.

1. Post

It goes without saying that you need to actually post content to your platforms to garner any sort of engagement; after all, nobody will know you are there if you don’t! In an ideal world, you would be posting at least once a day to each platform, but do not panic if you miss a day. Just try and keep it consistent, and maybe consider using a scheduling tool to help you.

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2. Comment

Leave thoughtful comments on other peoples’ posts. Social media is designed to be sociable, so try and have a conversation with followers and those you follow. Emojis are fine, but your comment will need words to help show those pesky algorithms what you like.

3. Respond

Unless your comment has hundreds of posts below it, it is only polite to try and respond to as many as you can. This all counts with the platform as engagement and so your post is shown to more people.

4. Like

The like button is there to show you content and tempt you into engaging with it. It also means the platform “learns” the sort of content you like and will show you more of it, and make suggestions of other accounts to follow or content to engage with.

5. Search

You get out what you put in. So, spend some time searching out your social media target audience. This is where your hashtags come in handy.

You can equally be found using hashtags, but if you put in too many your content will simply be lost in the dreaded algorithm, and your post becomes an absolute headache to try and read.

Stick to using two hashtags for Twitter, three hashtags for LinkedIn, five hashtags for Facebook and up to 30 for Instagram, but in a separate comment and not the post.

Read all our features on how to improve your social media channel.