Published Jan.$Brands, organizations, and institutions use social media platforms every single day to connect with their audiences, raise awareness, and drive leads and business.

With an engaged following on one or more of the major social networks, brands can effectively spread the word about campaigns, new initiatives, and new products and services. However, simply having 1,000 Facebook fans or 200 Twitter followers is not the best indicator of social media success.

It’s possible to have thousands of followers who never read your posts or click on your links. The key is to build a thriving online community of your ideal fans, the ones who'll actively engage with your content, share it with their networks, and ultimately, become paying customers.

It takes work to establish such, but that effort can pay off big time.

Looking to grow your social media audience? In this post, we'll look at eleven simple ways in which you can grow your social media following.

It's worth experimenting with contests on every social network on which you are active. Some examples of social media contests include:1. Hold contests

Contests can be a great way to get new people to Like and follow your accounts, while also keeping your current fans engaged with your Page.

• Comment to win – Participants leave a comment or answer a question
• Caption contest – Either the best caption (you choose) or the one with the most likes wins
• Fill-in-the-blank Contest – Ask participants to answer a trivia question
• Photo contest – Either the best photo (you choose) or the one with the most likes wins
• Multiple choice contest

Tips for a successful social media contest:

• Promote it everywhere - Use your website, email list, and other social networks to drum up participation.
• Do not give away prizes completely unrelated to your brand - For example, if you give away a new iPad, you might drive a lot of engagement and participation, but not necessarily from people who will eventually become customers or lifelong fans.
• Follow the platform rules - Each social platform has its own rules and regulations around contests - here's an overview of the key details.
• Follow up with entrants who don’t win - Send them a thank you for participating, along with something about your brand/organization’s work.

Include a visual with every post

Visuals are high-performers on social media, so be sure to include an eye-catching, colourful image or graphic with each post.

Consider these visual marketing statistics, compiled by HubSpot:

• Content with relevant images racks up 94% more views than content without images.
• Compared to other types of content, visual content is more than 40x more likely to get shared on social media.
• Instagram photos showing faces get 38% more likes than photos without faces.

You can use free graphic design tools like Canva to add graphics to your blog entries and social media posts.

Share more video

Video is the most engaging content type on every social media platform, so if you can, it's a good idea to create at least some form of video content to maximize engagement.

Be sure to upload your video directly to your platform of choice, rather than posting a link to an outside website (like YouTube). This way, your video will autoplay as people land on it while scrolling through their feeds, grabbing more attention.