Brands have long understood the need for a comprehensive presence in search engines and via email. After all, these free to low-cost strategies can help build passive traffic and ensure past subscribers and customers remain loyal. Nevertheless, social media is increasingly attracting both  time and budget from many brands.

Building a successful social media enterprise is arguably more straightforward than doing so via search engines – but also involves other factors, such as a need for paid advertising. Brands that want to generate explosive social media growth have to use content as the cornerstone of their strategies.

To help you out, let’s examine the key components of rapid and sustainable social media growth.

Know Who You’re Targeting

The biggest first step that any brand needs to take when trying to cultivate additional growth on social media is to find out who they’re targeting. The entirety of social media is comprised of countless microcosms of people, each with their own interests and demographics. Brands must always discover who exactly they’re focused on appealing to, but it is even more important for social media.

In some situations, your target audience might be disproportionately contained on specific social media platforms; reaching a teenage audience, for example, might be better done on Instagram than on Facebook. Once you have in hand the information necessary to paint a detailed picture about your audience, pinging URLs to them that encompasses the content they prefer gets much easier.

Uncover Their Desires

Every audience has preferences in terms of the content they wish to see. This is a huge reason why knowing who it is you’re targeting is so important. Older audiences may prefer traditional, written forms of content, while younger audiences will be more likely to engage with videos even on mobile devices.

If you are selling products or services to an audience, this is even more crucial. For instance, a real estate entity on social media will want to uncover exactly what criteria their audience values in terms of location (great educational offerings, walkability, price ranges, etc) – by incorporating these desires into the brand image itself and exuding it in every social media post, explosive growth becomes possible.

Use a Variety of Content

Even after you’ve discovered what your audience wants and who they are, explosive growth on social media still requires variance, creativity and experimentation. Most brands want to see their audiences swell exponentially; one such way to generate as much reach as possible is by varying the types of content you share and create.

While text-based posts on platforms such as Facebook can generate interaction, they’re not for everybody. Research shows that multimedia such as photos, images and videos generate several times as much engagement on average. By giving your audience what they want in a variety of different content formats, you can appeal to every subset of your target audience and maximize both reach and engagement.

Generating meaningful growth on social media is more than just pinging URLs to your blog or writing a few sentences here and there. To truly unlock that explosive growth potential, you must diligently uncover who your audience is, what they expect from your brand, and hammer them with a variety of different content formats for maximum reach.