10 Social Media Tactics for Rapid Follower Growth and Skyrocketing Engagement

Social media tactics refer to specific strategies used on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to achieve goals like increasing followers, engagement, brand awareness, and website traffic. Common tactics include creating visual content, using hashtags, partnering with influencers, running contests, posting during peak times, advertising, analyzing data, crafting shareable content, building relationships, and optimizing profiles. The aim is to implement proven approaches that resonate with target audiences.

Building an engaged audience on social media is more critical than ever. However, growing a following from scratch and getting people to interact with your content can feel like a monumental task. Where do you start? What works to ignite exponential growth?

The good news is – with the right social media tactics, you can cultivate an active tribe of followers faster than you think. This post will break down 10 proven strategies to expand your reach and boost engagement quickly. Let’s get started!

 Tactic # 1 among Social Media Tactics: Optimize Your Social Media Profiles 

Your social media profiles are the foundation for everything you do online. Are they instantly credible? Do they look professional and appealing at first glance? Taking the time to optimize your profiles shows visitors you mean business and makes them more likely to hit that coveted “follow” button. 

Key profile optimization tips:

• A consistent profile photo across platforms – a headshot or logo works best.
• Craft an engaging bio that quickly explains who you are and what value you provide.
• Include links to your website and other social profiles to drive traffic.
• Design an eye-catching header or cover photo containing branding elements.
• Fill out all fields (location, contact info, story, etc.) to look more legitimate.
• A complete and professional profile builds trust and helps convert casual visitors into loyal followers.

Pro Tip: Research competitors and influencers in your niche to get profile design inspiration.

Tactic 2: Identify Your Niche

The most effective social media strategies laser-target a specific niche. Mass market, one-size-fits-all content won’t cut it. Research your ideal audience – their challenges, interests, and values. Then, orient your entire approach around tailor-made content for that niche. 

Ways to identify your niche:

• Look at existing audience segments and see which are most engaged already.
• Use analytics to determine which types of content get the most response.
• Survey current followers about what they want more of.
• Check out communities related to your industry and see what needs aren’t being met.
• Use keyword research to find high-demand topics to specialize in.
• Delivering hyper-targeted content to an underserved niche is the key to rapid follower growth. Don’t try to please everyone – double down on your ideal audience.

Pro Tip: Regularly re-evaluate your niche as your followers and interests evolve.

Tactic 3: Follow Industry Influencers

Influencers with established followers in your niche are a goldmine for growth. By strategically engaging with them, you can organically expand your audience.

Here are some innovative ways to leverage influencers:

• Identify 5-10 influencers aligned with your niche to follow closely.
• Comment and like their new posts regularly to get on their radar.
• Look for opportunities to @ mention them or thoughtfully reply to their content.
• Repost their content when relevant and provide your insights.
• Ask to collaborate on giveaways or other initiatives when appropriate.
• Building authentic relationships with niche influencers gives you access to their follower base. The more value you provide, the more willing they will engage with and promote you.

Pro Tip: Don’t overly self-promote or spam influencers. Focus on contributing value.

Tactic 4: Use Optimal Posting Times

Sharing content makes a big difference in how many people will see it—posting when your audience is most active results in the highest reach and engagement. It takes trial and error, but you can determine your audience’s peak times.

Ways to identify ideal posting times:

• Check social media analytics to see when your current followers are online.
• Pay attention to when viral content and conversations happen in your niche.
• Test posting at different times and days and track engagement.
• Ask your audience directly when they’d prefer to hear from you.
• Use tools like Buffer to analyze the best times to post.
• Once you nail down the prime times, use social media scheduling tools to plan content and free up more time.

Pro Tip: Re-assess optimal posting times every few months as audience habits evolve.

Tactic 5: Employ Visual Storytelling

Humans are visual creatures. On social media, posts with eye-catching photos, videos, and graphics will consistently outperform blocks of plain text. When you incorporate quality visuals into your content strategy, you increase shares and engagement. 

Types of visual content to utilize as Social Media Tactic:

• Stunning photos are relevant to your niche and brand.
• Short videos like demos, tips, and behind-the-scenes.
• Infographics, charts, and graphs to make data enjoyable.
• Custom illustrations and cartoons to convey ideas.
• Captivating quotes overlaid on images.
• Your product or services in use – “in the wild.”
• Snippets or previews of long-form content like blogs and guides.
• Creative visual storytelling makes your brand more memorable and content more compelling to interact with.

Pro Tip: Use free image creation tools like Canva if you don’t have a designer.

Tactic 6: Use Targeted Hashtags

Hashtags help people outside your direct follower base find your content on social media. But generic tags like #marketing and #business are incredibly crowded. You’ll get better results targeting strategic niche hashtags. Take the time to research trending and popular tags related to your audience’s interests.

Smart hashtag strategy tips:

• Brainstorm a mix of broader and niche-specific hashtags to use.
• Search hashtags to ensure they are actively used before including them.
• Limit yourself to around 5-10 relevant hashtags per post to avoid looking spammy.
• Use hashtags associated with timely events, holidays, and trends.
• Please create your own branded hashtags and encourage followers to use them.
• Track which hashtags generate the most engagement and double down on those.
• Adding niche hashtags allows you to tap into communities outside your follower base and fuel new growth.

Pro Tip: Use a social media planning tool to manage a hashtag library you can easily insert.

Tactic 7: Create Shareable Content

Social media is fundamentally about sharing content. So, crafting posts tailored to provoke sharing is crucial for expanding your reach.

What drives people to share content?

• Humor and entertainment
•  Valuable information
• Surprise or controversy
• Positive emotions like inspiration

Types of inherently shareable content include:

• List posts like “10 Ways to Improve Your Productivity.”
• Helpful how-to articles and tutorials
• Interesting infographics and statistics
• Buzzworthy newsjacking of current events
• Amusing memes and cartoons
• Inspiring quotes and stories
• Give people content they naturally want to react to and pass on to their networks for bonus exposure.

Pro Tip: Pay attention to the posts that get shared and replicated the most on social media in your industry.

Tactic 8: Run Engaging Contests & Giveaways 

Contests, giveaways, and other “sweepstake” style content reward engagement from followers while attracting new ones. They incentivize social actions like follows, shares, tags, and comments – allowing you to essentially “bribe” people to interact and spread the word.

Best practices for contests and giveaways:

• Require users to follow you and tag friends to enter.
• Tie entries to natural engagement, like photo submissions or comments.
• Choose prizes relevant to your audience, like free products or gift cards.
• Promote widely, including email, paid ads, and influencer shoutouts.

Keep entry requirements and rules simple. 

• Limit the timeframe to create urgency.
• Contests that provide exciting prizes in exchange for social engagement can quickly gain you a flood of new followers.

Pro Tip: Run contests to promote launches and build buzz for big announcements.

Tactic 9: Leverage Paid Ads

While organic content should be the foundation, paid social media ads provide another fast track to expanded follower reach. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter all offer potent options to get your content and profile in front of targeted new audiences.

Tips for effective paid social campaigns:

• Promote your best-performing organic content.
• Target ads based on follower demographics, interests, and behaviors.
• Test different objectives like post engagement vs. follower acquisition.
• Set small daily budgets and closely monitor performance.
• Use compelling creative like eye-catching graphics and video.
• Send traffic to a targeted landing page to capture leads.
• Retarget engaged visitors across devices to drive conversions.
• Paid ads let you scale your social media growth much faster by proactively reaching untapped audiences.

Pro Tip: Focus on your most important business goals – not vanity metrics like follower count.

Tactic 10: Analyze and Refine Your Approach

Having a laser-targeted social media strategy is critical. But you’ll grow your following by executing that plan consistently and improving it over time. 

Steps to refine your approach:

• Regularly review social media analytics and insights.
• Determine which specific content and tactics perform best.
• Double down on what works while eliminating what doesn’t.
• Set clear goals and benchmarks to track progress over time.
• Ask your audience for direct feedback on your content.
• Stay on top of changes to social platform algorithms.
• Don’t get complacent! Continually test and optimize.
• Social media marketing is never “one and done.”

The platforms and community dynamics shift constantly. You need to analyze and refine your approach continually over the long term.

Pro Tip: Document your processes in a social media marketing plan to optimize efficiency.

Accelerate Your Social Media Growth with MAM Digital Pro

Growing your audience and engagement on social platforms takes consistent work. But with the right tailored tactics, you can accelerate your follower growth dramatically. The strategies outlined in this post will help you expand your reach, connect with influencers, and incentivize community building.

If you need additional help developing and executing a high-impact social media strategy, connect with the experts at MAM Digital Pro. Their premium social media marketing services can take your results to the next level.

Just remember – vanity metrics like follower count don’t measure your success. Focus on growing an audience that genuinely engages with and values your content. Quality over quantity. Put these social media tactics into play for your brand strategically. Track what moves the needle – then double down on those high-impact approaches. With a targeted, agile strategy and commitment to long-term excellence, you’ll be well on your way to social media success!

FAQs

Q1: What are the most effective social media tactics to increase brand awareness?

A: The top tactics to boost brand awareness through social media include consistently posting engaging content, leveraging influencers and brand advocates, using visual assets like videos and images, running contests and sweepstakes, using branded hashtags, running targeted ads, optimizing social media profiles, partnering with other brands, monitoring and responding to mentions, and analyzing performance data.

Q2: How do you develop an integrated social media strategy across multiple platforms?

A: Key steps include setting SMART goals, benchmarking competitors, identifying your target audiences and ideal channels, auditing existing accounts and performance, mapping out content themes and pillars, developing guidelines for tone and engagement, creating policies for review and approvals, establishing a content creation and distribution workflow, setting a posting schedule, defining success metrics, and planning an evaluation cadence.

Q3: What social media tactics can drive website traffic?

A: Tactics to boost website traffic include sharing links to your latest blog content, promoting special offers or downloads, leveraging Instagram links in Stories and posts, running website-linked ads, collaborating with influencers on guest posts, hosting social media giveaways that require visiting your site, cross-promoting content across channels, repurposing evergreen content, optimizing posts for SEO, and retargeting engaged visitors through ads.

Q4: How do you track the ROI of social media marketing activities?

A: Key metrics to measure social media ROI include engagement rate, leads generated, website traffic referred, sales influenced, follower growth rate, impressions, reach, click-through-rate, cost per lead/sale, conversions from social ads, and comparing goal performance to cost of marketing effort in time and budget. Using UTM parameters and pixels helps attribute value.

Q5: What tools are most helpful in managing social media more efficiently?

A: Top social media management tools include Buffer and Hootsuite for scheduling and publishing, BuzzSumo and Keyhole for monitoring and analytics, Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud for designing visual assets, Linktree and Tap. Bio is for link consolidation, Zoho Social and Sprout Social are for overall social media management, and native platform tools like Facebook IQ and Instagram Insights.

Q6: How can you create viral social media content?

A: Strategies for creating viral social media content include tapping into trending topics and newsjacking, leveraging controversial headlines, invoking solid emotions, incorporating humor, telling stories through campaigns, striking motivational tones, inspiring awe through visuals, jumping on new platform features, partnering with influencers, and crafting content optimized for sharing across profiles.

Q7: What are some micro influencer best practices?

A: Best practices with micro-influencers include finding ones relevant to your niche, setting clear expectations upfront, having tiered packages for compensation and incentives, providing assets and info to make their job easier, focusing on long-term partnerships versus one-offs, encouraging creativity within branded guidelines, cross-promoting their channels, prioritizing genuine advocacy over big numbers, and tracking ROI based on engagement and conversions.

Q8: How do you promote events on social media?

A: Tactics to promote events through social media include creating eye-catching graphics and videos, introducing featured speakers, showcasing previous successful events, offering special discounts on tickets for social shares, enabling event registration directly through posts, live streaming video coverage, creating unique branded hashtags, covering behind the scenes preparations, encouraging user-generated content, and retargeting engaged users through ads.

Q9: What are the keys to effective B2B social media marketing?

A: Crucial B2B social media strategies include targeting decision-makers, tapping into industry conversations, establishing thought leadership, focusing on the educational over promotional, converting leads through retargeting, driving traffic to gated assets, running LinkedIn ad campaigns, leveraging employee networks, partnering with industry influencers, monitoring brand mentions for outreach, contributing value on niche communities, and tracking website visitors and leads by channel.

Q10: How do you build an engaged community on social platforms?

A: Ways to build an engaged community include consistently sharing high-value content, responding to comments and questions, leveraging user-generated content, asking for feedback and input, onboarding ambassadors, hosting giveaways and contests, using live video interactions, curating niche discussions in private groups, collaborating with aligned brands, analyzing data for insights, setting clear guidelines for civil discourse, and optimizing profiles to welcome community members.