One of the main problems of companies when they initiate their strategies in social networks is how to achieve a critical and relevant mass of followers. Many experts will tell you that the number of followers does not matter, others will tell you that the amount is indispensable … but certainly, the really true is that without followers we can not build a community around our company or brand.

To achieve this, it is necessary to develop a clear strategy in the different social networks where our company or brand is present. A strategy with different and fundamental phases as they are; the launch, management, optimization and analysis of ROI.

However, on this occasion, we are going to focus on the first phase, the launch phase. One of its main objectives is obviously to generate public, get fans and followers. Here we will take care of the quality of them, but in a non-selective way and that later we will be able to become more demanding.

Generally, people who come into contact with us for the first time through a profile or page in social networks, do not know that we have just started our work in it and therefore, can perceive the low number of followers as a false indication that we are not really relevant or interesting.

So, in this first stage we agree with a part of the experts who affirm the importance of having many followers, or at least a critical mass of them sufficiently remarkable. We must also take into account that the more we are more likely to have viralize our message on the network.

Once this goal is achieved, the management phase begins, and in which the number of followers as such ceases to be relatively important. What is already relevant in this stage is the quality of them. In other words, to ensure that our critical mass of followers corresponds to that of a profile of really active users and that they are interested and participatory.

At this time, we will agree with those experts who affirm that quality is more important than quantity. It is useless to have 35,000 followers on Twitter if we are not finally able to take advantage of their potential or simply passive users whose participation is nil or scarce.

Summarizing all the above, the number of fans or followers of our community in social networks can be of vital importance depending on the phase of our strategy and the general profile of most of them. However, what will define our community or its success and relevance will not be the number of people who compose it, but the quality and capacity when interacting and their participation. If we achieve that, the more active and influential people participate, the more likely we are that our message will go further and reach a greater impact.

If our goal is to start creating a large community, we can launch different actions as part of our initial strategy to achieve followers in different social networks.

Twitter

• Search the profiles that you are interested in following you and follow them.
• Connect your Twitter profile to your website.
• Find opinion leaders in your industry and follow the people who follow them.
• If you want people from a certain geographic segment to follow you, look for them through geolocation tools such as HootSuite or directly from Google.
• Use #Hashtag with keywords that your market would occupy.
• Interact with your followers
• Give RT to the people you follow (worth the content)
• Join communities through #HashTag
• Create a community on a specific topic and give it a #HashTag invite!

Facebook

• Invite your contacts from your personal profile
• Use Facebook ads
• Connect your Facebook profile to your website
• Use keywords in your publications, such as Notes.
• Make contests, they are one of the best tools.
• Post good content
• Invite your audience from other social networks to join this network
• Publish in a pleasant way integrates humor content about your business
• Use videos as they go viral in this network
• Encourage conversation
• Invite you to follow you on Facebook in your Blog and in your email marketing campaigns
• Include Facebook comments on your website
• Take advantage of the new applications of the TimeLine: Milestone, Photo of Biography, covers of applications, post fixes.

Linkedin

• Invite to connect all your contacts of university, company or school
• Use the “Search” tool to find people and that Linkedin will send you recommendations according to what you program.
• Check the contacts of your contacts and invite those that interest you.
• Keep your profile updated and dynamic.
• Join groups and participate in their debates and forums
• Answer questions about your area of ​​knowledge