Getting reach with less than 1,000 followers

Welcome to another edition of PROse, the B2B marketer's no BS guide to growing an engaged audience.

First thing first, did January fly by for anyone else??

I could’ve sworn it was Christmas just yesterday 😮‍💨

Anyway, I’m looking forward to February. It’s going to be an exciting month!

Alright, let's jump into this week's email.

Every social media manager wants three things:

1. More followers

2. More engagement

3. More reach

But the way we get those things is in reverse order.

First, you improve reach, then you get more engagement, and better engagement leads to more followers.

The problem is when you have less than 1,000 followers, getting reach is an uphill battle.

But it’s not impossible.

In fact, one of our agency clients is pushing 40k impressions/mo (and growing) on Twitter with less than 300 followers (growing at 50% MoM).

How did we do it? By following a simple two-step strategy:

1. Engage with your niche

If this sounds like a no-brainer to you, congratulations! You’re one of the few people who understand social media is supposed to be social.

Truth is, lots of brands—large and small—schedule content, publish, and never engage with their own comments or other brands & creators in their space.

That’s a huge mistake. Especially the latter part.

If you have less than 1,000 followers, the only way more people will see your content is if you engage with other relevant accounts and get in front of their audience.

If you’re not doing that, start small but start now:

→ List other brands in your space (include adjacent brands)

→ Monitor their account and when the time’s right, write thoughtful replies to their posts

→ Also look for other people & brands engaging their content who might fit your target audience and engage with their posts too

A note on thoughtful replies: unless it’s a strict brand guideline, don’t go too “corporate”. Write like you’d text a friend. You want to sound like a human, not an automated system.

2. Learn the algorithm and play the game

Let’s get real for a second.

Many people (myself included) hate when we see cringey content made for getting likes and gaming the algorithm.

We pinky swear we will never do that.

But deep down, the reason we hate it is because it works and we wish it didn’t.

So here’s some bitter truth: if we don’t give the algorithm what it wants, we won’t get what we want.

You can fight creating the form of content that works because you’ve seen other people do it poorly, but it’ll only lead to suboptimal growth.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for you to sell your soul for likes.

But you do need to understand what good form looks like for the platform you're building on, and do that.

Right now:

→ Twitter is about threads

→ LinkedIn is about carousels

→ Instagram is about short-form video & stories (for now)

If you never created any of those, give it a try. You can repurpose old content to save time.

The first may not be a home run but after your 5th, 6th, 7th try, you might notice an uptick in all the right metrics.

So that’s really it.

If it sounds simple, that’s because it is.

Don’t complicate your strategy, just focus on having good substance & form.

Let the rest work itself out.

That's a wrap, folks! But before you go...

If you enjoyed this email, reply and let me know what stuck out. You can also send general feedback!

I'd love to get feedback on what's working and how I can improve.