Building Social Media Engagement and Following From Nothing?

[MakeMoreMoves]

So I have read on here to build a following just follow/unfollow. Ok Check. But my problem is having consistent content. I am in fitness industry

My ideas thus far starting from nothing:
1) My own product photos in the wild/outside (5 pics)
2) Stock photos overlayed with my motivational slogan (5 pics)
3) Use of my photo with models (Recommendations of services where photographers have contact with models using my fitness product?) don't want to break the bank. I don't have that many "hot" friends unfortunately.
4) Sending free samples to established social media models (Chances of these people making a post for free? or do most charge?)
5) Every once in a while, put an AD

Once established:
1) Repost of customers using my product. Win win for both me and customer

Having a hard time thinking about content with and without product. I obviously don't want all my product photos just to be my product, I'll start to lose all followers. I am a fan of the 80/20. 80%content 20% sell. More ideas? I feel like the social media will be repetitive if I just use my current ideas.

 

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[Vincent_Vega]

Seriously? Fitness is one of the easiest niches to find content. Every kind of motivational slogans, every kind of fitness/bodybuilding memes, every kind of pics of athletes etc etc. The options are endless in this niche. Just take a look at all the motivational fitness pages on IG and FB. Easy to find content there.

 

[MakeMoreMoves]

Seriously? Fitness is one of the easiest niches to find content. Every kind of motivational slogans, every kind of fitness/bodybuilding memes, every kind of pics of athletes etc etc. The options are endless in this niche. Just take a look at all the motivational fitness pages on IG and FB. Easy to find content there.

Yes, seriously. The motivational slogans that are cliche or those fitness/bodybuilding memes are so overused at this point. It does not give a good image at all. When I see that stuff, all I do is cringe. Pictures of athletes, I can't just steal those.

 

[Andy Black]

So I have read on here to build a following just follow/unfollow. Ok Check. But my problem is having consistent content. I am in fitness industry

My ideas thus far starting from nothing:
1) My own product photos in the wild/outside (5 pics)
2) Stock photos overlayed with my motivational slogan (5 pics)
3) Use of my photo with models (Recommendations of services where photographers have contact with models using my fitness product?) don't want to break the bank. I don't have that many "hot" friends unfortunately.
4) Sending free samples to established social media models (Chances of these people making a post for free? or do most charge?)
5) Every once in a while, put an AD

Once established:
1) Repost of customers using my product. Win win for both me and customer

Having a hard time thinking about content with and without product. I obviously don't want all my product photos just to be my product, I'll start to lose all followers. I am a fan of the 80/20. 80%content 20% sell. More ideas? I feel like the social media will be repetitive if I just use my current ideas.

Fitness is not my niche at all. There's a few people in the forum in that niche though.

Also, I'm not sure I'm the best qualified to advise about building social engagement and a following. I suppose I've done alright within the forum, but I'm only just stepping outside and into "social media" as everyone else knows it.

Anyway, I think the follow/unfollow is just a tactic.

You need to understand the religion of adding value first. Then people will continue following/consuming your content, AND they will start referring friends naturally.

Then you need to get your head round where the consumers are, and where their attention is.

Then you need to understand the platform, and how to engage with people natively.

Remember that you're dealing with people, not clicks and numbers.

Google for Gary Vaynerchuk and go on a video binge for a while. He's the main social media practitioner out there who's speaking the most sense.

Knowing little about you, your business, your vertical/niche, and "social media", all I can do is point you towards the last post I created in one of my progress threads here.

 

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[avilux]

Sure you can steal other people's content. It's not really stealing even, it's more just making a better use of it than the original creator. Fitness is one of the easiest niches on social media to grow and make money with. People are just inherently stupid, and so you capitalize on that. They will fall for any silly product that promises muscle growth or weight loss or better blood-flow or whatever it be, as long as the marketing is done right.

Just get your brand on the big three platforms (Twitter, FB, and IG), and then later on when you can afford it, move onto Youtube. Instagram and Twitter are the easiest, since one's just posting pictures and the other's just 120 characters. Daily uploads are KEY.

Let's start with IG. For brand new accounts, if you're going to be doing it blackhat (using automation for following/unfollowing/commenting/etc), make sure the account has at least 6 pictures. But 9 would be good. Make good use of hashtags. Since these are your first pictures, upload them with 30 tags. Make sure the quality is as high-def as it can get in the 640x640. Watermark each of the pictures with your site and/or logo. Make a good captivating caption and give it some space between the tags. (hit return a few times if on Android) If you like aesthetics, remove most of the tags after an hour (most of the people who would've seen it pop up in searches, would've liked your pictures already by then). It kinda gives you a boost in likes even though you'll have 0 followers. Make sure the profile picture has a nice logo, the bio clearly represents your company, and that your site is in the link section. Then begin following the followers of the big accounts in supplements/fitness/workout/diet/weightloss/etc. (whichever niche or subniche applies best to you) and wait for them to follow you back. You'll most likely get anywhere from 10-30% followback. Now you can go 2 routes here. Let following continue until you hit 7,500, and then unfollow till you get down to 0, and then repeat. Or, go up to the maximum amount for the day and then unfollow the very same day. Now followliker and some other bots recently have been sucking a$$ and there's glitches so it may take an extra day for it to switch from follow to unfollow mode. Personally however, I prefer the second method as again, aesthetics. They matter if you want good engagement. Good engagement is 2-4% in fitness, with 5 or more being epic. 1% or below is shit. The best engagement I've ever received on a highly targeted account in a different niche was 10-11% average. It was back when Fallout4 came out, and even though I didn't know crap about the game, I was the only big account in the subniche and the followers were pretty dedicated. Shame I decided to sell it, but then again I had zero interest in it. Anyways, aim for 4%. Delete any bad comments you see, and block trolls/bots. Once you have established your plan for your account, post daily 2-3 pictures. Space them apart quite well. Figure out the best time to post daily to get the best engagements with your followers. If anyone complains that you unfollow them, cya, they just got blocked and reported.

Probably the best strategy would be to find your direct competition. Get their followers, look at their tactics and appropriate them for yourself. Take their pictures (and if you have some moral questioning about this, then fine, edit them slightly. Because editing them just a tad, and then pasting your logo/url on them is perfectly fine) and if they become a threat, ban them. To ban your competition, it's very simple. Just get 10-15 PVA's and report the account's pictures and the account itself as much as possible. And remember, if you think this is dirty, then some day you may just get this done to you and you'll be the one crying about it. It's a dog eat dog world. So prepare for it. Also prepare that at ANY MOMENT, any social media platform can disable your account forever without zero reasoning. Because they own it. So always have a backup plan. Have multiple accounts. Funnel traffic in between them and your site and in between the platforms.

If you really are against stealing pictures, then just go on Instagram and look up the motivational quotes and fitness pictures and make some yourself in photoshop. Just borrow some ideas for inspiration and voila. But I mean everybody steals on IG anyways, and the bigger your account is, the less Instagram will care. Remember. Time is money. You have to value every second. So taking someone else's quality picture album is much easier than wasting your minutes away editing one picture.

If you use automation, or do it manually (probably not the wisest decision in the long run), it's more advisable to do low rates. For a program, maybe 300-500 follows daily with 20-30 seconds set in between. Once the account has hit a few thousand followers, up it up a bit. Once it's past 25K or a decent number like that, up it up to maybe 1K daily but still keep the seconds in between high. Maybe even raise it just to be safe. Oh and of course I do hope you're going to be using proxies wisely. Max 3 per IP, but 2 is better. If you're doing manually, just make sure to space it out every hour or two. Go up to 300-500 as well.

Once your account grows, you have 2 routes. Really care for it, or spam the crap out of it and milk it for everything it's got. But we're thinking long-term here most likely, so first choice. Your main account, post a lot of product photos. Use clients to pose for your products. Offer them a 10% discount for their next purchase if they do. Offer like other fitness companies, stickers, shirts, etc. Start a sponsorship program. Pay commissions (I could go way more in depth with this but I don't have the time to do so). Also on other accounts, use mentions. You can find a mentions dealer that sells 1K people per $2-3. Launch them at a picture or video (video would be best). Make sure the description is perfect and has great selling points. Redirect people to your site. At the end of the video, send them to the site. Sites that do it though are like coolsouk and you can find others that will do it for $5-6 per 1K. If you have thousands to invest, this really pays off as you can get a lot of leads very quickly. Then hopefully your landing page will be perfect enough to close on the clients.

The next step is to focus on Twitter and FB. Depending on how much you have of capital to play with, message people and ask for highly-targeted promotions. You cant just take any random shoutouts. You have to research which ones will actually be worth the price. Then just use similar strategies as on IG and you'll be good. Facebook is a little tricky nowadays, because engagement will be bad and it's difficult to start up without some investment, but it can be done. It'd be better to have a few accounts with 5K friends though than pages. Maybe join groups as well.

Once you have a big brand, then move onto youtube. It's like a playground if you have a lot of cash to invest and people to watch it.

Good luck with Fitness. I used to be in it for a few months before it bored me. My best sales days I'd hit 15-20, and each one was worth $32-40. So it wasn't bad, considering I spent a few minutes a day updating my accounts. Later sold some accounts, left others alone. Moved onto Cannabis niche. But hey, you can make money with anything as long as you persist. And you don't lose until you give up.

 

[BlahBlahBlah]

I am currently using Facebook paid advertising and through split testing I am slowly managing to get relatively cheap likes. Happy with it.

I will try to follow the Instagram strategy suggested above (apart from the banning of competitors, find it unethical to be honest). I will start next week as I am waiting to receive new phone on Tuesday and install Instagram as mine died a couple of days ago.

About Twitter, I guess the strategy to follow the followers of competitors suggested for Instagram can also be used for Twitter? My question is, as I have a new account with 0 followers would it make sense to buy a few followers on Fiverr (not talking about big numbers, just maybe a few hundreds to get started and make the account look a bit better than with no followers). On Facebook I am paying for advertising and I would never buy fake likes as I know Facebook algorithm would work against me anyway, but I am not sure whether on Twitter works differently? Same question for Instagram.

Thank you for your advice.

 

[Belcher]

Just to add to paid Facebook advertising, I don't want people to be as ignorant as I was in terms of using the tools Facebook provide you to really narrow down your target audience BEFORE you make an ad. I only found out about audience insights a couple of nights ago and I feel silly for not looking for something like it earlier.

Here is the link to their guide: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/audience-insights

 

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[Mikkel]

My suggestion is what I currently am using. I have 3 separate Instagram accounts, all in different niches. I am currently building up my followings on all of them. On one particular account, started a week ago, I have 1,000 followers. I have gotten DM's from 3 people just yesterday asking if I was either selling anything or asking for advice.

What I have done is simply find interesting photos on IG and post them, I tag the original owner of photo so they get credit. I also like about 1300 photos every day, which is where I am generating all my followers. After I got my Dm's asking me if I was selling anything I decided to make a Survey Monkey questionaire and asked my followers 1 simple question. What would you like to see from @yourusername? I gave them a list of 3 potential products and then gave them an option to saying "nothing" or other, where they could write what they would like to buy if we were to sell it. Results are still pending, I don;t know what that will be, but I assume that it will gage what I can sell to my followers, while still building a following. I want to allocate the money I have into ventures that will work.

My suggestion to you. Don't spend all your money on something you don't know will pan out. You can very easily build an instagram account with unoriginal content. If people start really following you, then start making your own content, but when you first start out, not many people will notice you and if you are not putting out 2-3 photos a day, you may just get lost in the feeding frenzy of Instagram .

 

[avilux]

I am currently using Facebook paid advertising and through split testing I am slowly managing to get relatively cheap likes. Happy with it.

I will try to follow the Instagram strategy suggested above (apart from the banning of competitors, find it unethical to be honest). I will start next week as I am waiting to receive new phone on Tuesday and install Instagram as mine died a couple of days ago.

About Twitter, I guess the strategy to follow the followers of competitors suggested for Instagram can also be used for Twitter? My question is, as I have a new account with 0 followers would it make sense to buy a few followers on Fiverr (not talking about big numbers, just maybe a few hundreds to get started and make the account look a bit better than with no followers). On Facebook I am paying for advertising and I would never buy fake likes as I know Facebook algorithm would work against me anyway, but I am not sure whether on Twitter works differently? Same question for Instagram.

Thank you for your advice.

I am always against fake likes/subs/etc. Why pay money for something that will help ZERO with engagement, and will even hurt you? You can follow people and get at least SOME engagement. Sure, the more followers you have, the more people that'll follow you. You'll probably be getting 10% followback instead of 30% when you start out. But that's still something. After the first few days, you'll have a better looking profile and you'll be getting some likes and retweets and whatnot. Sure you could buy fake followers and fake engagement too, but again, more money that might ultimately hurt you. It may just be a few dollars, but it's just better not to "invest" that. And by the way, most of the stuff on Fiverr is crap anyways. For anyone who is gung-ho about fakes, there's better reselling sites or vendors out there with a few quick searches. A lot of stuff on fiverr hurts people's social media and sites. I know this doesn't exactly pertain to you, but the SEO side ESPECIALLY. People don't know what they're buying, and one $5 purchase could cause you to lose hundreds of dollars in the long term. In a few days your social media accounts will look presentable and follow back will increase. These things take time, patience, and persistence. But it'll be worth it. Hard work pays off ultimately.