Social Media QR Code: Increase your following on all platforms

You are probably a small business or marketer. And you are looking forward to using social media to market your products or services. Or to generate sales.

And you are right. Social media is a powerful marketing tool. According to SEO Expert, 80% companies across the world are using social media for marketing purposes.

Hence, you want to increase your social media followersfor lead generation and branding on social media. And you do not want followers that just an add on to the numbers. 

You rather want ones who find your services helpful and remain loyal to your business or brand in the long run.

So the question is, how to gain social media followers? Keep reading to know how.

A. How to increase social media followers

There are two things you can do to achieve your goal:

1. Create a well-optimized social media profile

The first thing you need to gain followers is—an optimized page or profile.

That means, make sure it is has up-to-date details about your business or brand. And you regularly post content. What will that do?

It will keep your existing followers engaged. And it will also give a good reason to the prospective followers to follow you.

Second, make sure your profile handle is easy to remember. For example—’PassionateCoder’ is better than ‘Passionate_Coder10’.

Such handles make it easier for people to remember them and find you online.

Third, make sure you use appropriate hashtags in each of your posts. These hashtags increase the discoverability of your posts. And people who like them, can follow you easily.

To find appropriate hashtags, you can use tools such as ‘Hashtagify’.

2. Promote your profile

Once your profile or page is ready, get started on promoting it to gain relevant followers. How?

You can cross pollinate your accounts. Say, ask your Twitter followers to follow you on Facebook too. The ones who are interested in your services on one social media site are likely to follow you on the other site as well. You can also use social media scheduler to make your brand content get posted at the best time to gain more followers. For that, you can plan and schedule your posts using free Hootsuite alternatives.

Other than that, you can also use print media to gain followers. How?

If you’re a product-based company, you can add your profile handles on product packaging or carry bags. Customers can use these handles to find your profile and follow you.

In fact, you can also add your profile handles to your brochures and magazines.

But the only problem is—people will have to pull out their phones to open the appropriate social media app, type your profile handle, find you, and finally follow you.

This is a long process and needs both time and effort. So why not make it easier for them to take action. How?

Using a Social Media QR Code.

B. Social Media QR Code

There are many QR Code generators that allow you to link a QR Code to one of your social media accounts. It could be your Facebook Page, Twitter Account, Instagram profile, or LinkedIn profile.

But if you are a decent-sized company, you might probably have more than one social media account. The popular ones for businesses include Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

But then will you go for a QR Code for Facebook or the one for Instagram? How do you choose between all these social media platforms?

The answer is simple—just don’t. Let your audience make that choice. Thinking—what does that mean?

Well, rather creating a QR Code for just one social media site, give your audience the option to follow you their favorite platform.

That’s what a Social Media QR Code does. When scanned, it redirects the end-users to a webpage with links to all your social media profiles or pages. They can then choose their favorite one to follow you.

And to scan a QR Code, all that they need is—a camera-equipped smartphone that they always carry along. That simple!

A Social Media QR Code even allows you to track its scanning activity and edit its content anytime you want. 

That means you can monitor when your QR Code was scanned, how many people scanned it, and where did they scan it.

And say, you create a Social Media QR Code with links to your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram account. A month later, you wish to replace the Instagram link with that of another social media platform.

Since a Social Media QR Code is dynamic in nature, you can make such edits anytime. Yet your QR Code will remain the same. No need to reprint it.

C. How to create a Social Media QR Code

Now that you know what a Social Media QR Code is, the next question is—how to create one?

But how do you then decide the best one for your use case? By comparing all of them one-by-one, right?

Well, that is a long process and will need both time and effort. Don’t worry. Here’s a detailed comparison chart of the top QR Code generators available online. You can go through it to decide the best one for your needs.

Using Scanova QR Code generator for a demo, here’s how you can create a Social Media QR Code:

1. Go to Scanova QR Code Generator and click on Create QR Code

2. QR Code categories, select Social Media QR Code

3. On the page that loads, select the design that you’d want your landing page to look like. Then, start adding profile links of your choice. You can also use the Logo Image option to add a logo to the landing page

4. Once you’ve entered the content to be encoded, click Continue

5. You can now name your QR Code. Once done, continue creating QR Code.

6. On the screen that loads, you’ll see two design options— custom with logo and custom with background. You can proceed with either of them

Note that a customized QR Code attracts much more scans than a black-and-white one. Hence, you must consider adding design to your QR Code

7. Once you QR Code is ready, say after you design it, click Done Editing.

8. Now to download your QR Code, you need to Sign Up. Go ahead to create an account and start up your 14-day free trial.

9. Once you create an account, you will be promoted to My QR Codes page. Here, you can download your QR Code by clicking on download icon.

10. A window will open asking you to specify QR Code image size and format, Once you enter the details, click Export

That’s it. Your Social Media QR Code is ready.

B. Get your users to mail you

You can even get your users to mail you with the Social Media QR Code itself. As users click on this link, the default mailing application of their phones will open with pre-filled recipient, subject, and email body fields.

To add a mailto link, follow these steps:

1.Add the Custom Link 2 field while creating the QR Code (see screenshot)

2. In the URL field, add mailto:[email protected] (replace ‘[email protected]’ with the email address you want in the ‘To’ line in the user’s email app)

3. To add CC or BCC, further add: ?cc=exam[email protected] (eg. mailto:[email protected][email protected])

4. To add a subject line, add: ?subject=Email%20Subject (eg. mailto:[email protected]?subject=Email%20Subject)

5. To add body text, append: &body=Body%20Text (eg. mailto:[email protected]?bodyt=Body%20)

You can also edit the button text to ‘Email Me’, ‘Email Us’, etc.

C. How to edit Social Media QR Code

As mentioned earlier, Social Media QR Codes are Dynamic QR Codes. That means you can edit their content to add or delete the links anytime you want.

Here is how Scanova QR Code generator allows you to do it:

1. Login to your Scanova account and go to My QR Codes.

2. Select the QR Code you want to edit

3. Here you can edit the following things:

Content: You can edit the content you linked to a QR Code

Advance Settings: You can enable password protection, GPS location, and lead generation

Design: You can edit the design again the way you want to

4. Click Update QR Code

That’s it. Your QR Code will be updated. You can scan it to cross-check the changes.

That’s it. Your QR Code will be updated. And you will see the pattern of your updated QR Code is just the same as the earlier one. The links will be updated and you can use the same QR Code.

That’s all you need to know about a Social Media QR Codes 

A Social Media QR Code helps you get followers by making it easier for them to find you online. Giving them the option to follow you on their favorite social media site. And even helps you by allowing you to monitor its scanning activity and giving the option to edit the content anytime.

So marketers, thinking about the next step? Go ahead to create a Social Media QR Code.

Create a Social Media QR Code now

Give your audience the option to choose their favourite social media platform to engage with your business

Create QR Code now

Still have queries? Feel free to ask them in the comments section below.