There is often a huge misconception in the management of social media. 

Many people think that your work as a content creator ends when you press the “publish” button on your social media profile. 

This could not be further from the truth. 

In reality, what needs to happen is the exact opposite. 

Seeding your content online in order to reach its maximum possible reach is as important as creating high-quality content.

In order to do this successfully, you need to have a plan in place, so that your brand can broaden its audience with every post. 

This approach we use of social media to achieve this goal is called  “amplification”. 

In this post, we’re going to discuss 5 different amplification strategies that can allow your brand to grow and expand its organic reach.

With no further ado, let’s dive into the topic. 

#1 Publish Your Content On Multiple Media Platforms.

One of the most common amplification strategies consists in publishing your content on multiple platforms. This is certainly a good way to expand your brand’s reach, but it comes with a compromise. 

It is generally a good idea to only manage those social media profiles that you can afford to “feed” with regular, high-quality content. 

The goal of a social media presence, after all, is to persuade your customers of the high social and emotional value of your products. In order to achieve this goal, as we often say in the business “less is more”. 

One high-quality profile is better than 5 low-quality ones.

Having said this, as different social media platforms allow brands to use different digital experiences to engage their audience, it can be a good idea to repurpose content to fit the online experience that each platform provides. 

By doing this, you’ll be able to reach a broader audience, and also experiment on the response that your content gets in each platform, helping you figure out which channels work best for your brand.

#2 Use Advertising to Expand Your Content’s Organic Reach

Another common approach to expanding your brand’s reach is to complement organic reach with paid advertising. 

This makes particular sense if you have a clearly profiled target customer, and you want to put your content right in front of him\her. 

There are some high-value customers who are really hard to connect to, as they are sought after by many different brands. By using advertising, you can certainly have an advantage in reaching your clients without relying too much on luck with organic algorithms. 

Of course, designing an effective advertising strategy entails its own challenges, as writing effective sales copy is a tough skill to master. If you’re looking for some help, in this post, we’re providing some helpful advice on how to avoid the most common mistakes.

#3 Do Industry Outreach and Connect to Influencers

Another popular approach entails conducting industry outreach and building relationships with thought leaders and influencers in your industry. 

This is one of the most effective approaches to amplification if done right. 

In some cases, just one “shoutout” from an influencer in your niche can provide you with a huge bump up in your following thanks to the earned media effect.

The challenge, however, comes with building the relationships and connections that allow you to team up with other brands or influencers who are aligned with your business. 

In many cases, it is advised to foster a strong relationship with these partners much before you actually have to ask for their support.  Influencers may support a project they believe in, that they find useful and aligned with their own social presence.

As influencers receive hundreds of requests of this nature on a weekly basis, it’s important to not make the relationship exclusively monetary, otherwise using paid advertising, can be a much better use of your time.

#4 Use Your Strongest Customers to Reach New Audiences

Another element to account for relates to using the customers who are most engaged and supportive of your project as a “chamber of resonance” for your communication strategy. 

If you are able to build that “domino effect” that allows you to tap into the following and communities of your most loyal and supportive followers, you can gain so much more traction. 

The principle behind this approach is that the communities of your strongest followers have a likelihood of sharing among themselves similar tastes and interests, making them a great fit for your audience expansion strategy. 

5. Use Data To Invest On What Works

Going back to our initial point, it has become clear, that when you click that “publish” button, that’s when the work begins. 

In this post, we’ve looked at 5 strategies that can help you build a broader audience, but which one, or which ones to choose?

If you give yourself enough time you’ll be able to see which ones work best, as for any communication approach it can take time to optimize your strategy. 

What we recommend doing, is avoiding the common trap of relying on instinct. You want to make sure that your approach is data-driven and objective. This is why you want to survey how different content performs on different platforms so that in time, you can focus most of your budget and time on what works best. 

For as much as amplification is about “doing more” to reach more people, let’s also remember that a communication strategy is also about deciding what not to do.

Great, now that we’ve covered all of our pieces of advice, let’s move towards drawing a few conclusive remarks.

Conclusions

There you have it! In this post, we looked into 5 different strategies to help your brand access a broader audience by leveraging the power of amplification. 

With these 5 strategies, you can make sure the content you worked so hard in creating will reach your public and bring value to your community.

It can be helpful to complement online research with some literature to build a more structured and comprehensive understanding of social media management.
If you’d like to read more about this topic, this is a book we recommend reading: Social Media Strategy.

Also, don’t forget to check out our blog, where we’re providing a lot of free resources on social media strategy.

If you’re interested in learning more about Content Marketing, don’t hesitate to take a look at our course “Content Marketing for Creative Rockstars“. Our short and to-the-point, online class covers a wide range of topics spanning from developing blog posts capable of driving profitable traffic to strategies for getting strong conversion rates on your landing pages. Here’s a link to the course, if you use the discount code BLOG20 you can access a 20% discount. Enjoy!