Every brand wants their content to go viral and reach huge audiences on social media. But achieving cut-through on crowded platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok requires thoughtful planning and strategy. Simply posting your content will not make it automatically go viral. In this post, we’ll outline 10 proven social media marketing techniques to expand your reach and get more eyeballs on your brand.
From tapping into trends and leveraging influencers to optimizing hashtags and analyzing performance data, these strategies can help launch your content into the social media stratosphere. While viral moments often include some luck, consistently implementing these practices will dramatically increase the likelihood of social media success and expanded brand awareness.
Piggyback Trending Topics
Latching onto trending topics and current news events allows brands to tap into surges in audience interest around cultural moments. But rather than overt advertising or forcing your brand into the conversation, you must aim to add value through creative and thoughtful content. For example, brands could put out social commentary, memes, or humor around new viral meme trends, pop culture news events, or timely issues to share an angle in their brand voice. Joining these bigger conversations when relevant allows your content to get exposure to wider audiences already engaged in that topic’s momentum, which can introduce your brand to new followers.
Partner With Nano & Micro-Influencers
Big social media influencers often charge enormous sums for branded content and have lower engagement rates due to fake followers. But nano and micro-influencers with under 10,000 and 100,000 authentic followers respectively often offer better ROI. Identify standout niche voices closely aligned with your brand and product category to partner with. An effective influencer partnership involves working together to create original branded content that speaks to both the influencer’s followers and your target audience. The authenticity of nano and micro-influencers resonates more deeply with engaged followers versus broad-reach celebrities.
Optimize Hashtags
Strategic hashtag use in your social posts and content allows you to tap into specific niches and expand your content’s reach into broader conversations. Conduct research around your industry, brand name, products, and current events to identify top trending hashtags and niche community hashtags. Include the most relevant mix of branded and trending hashtags in natural ways within your captions and actual content. Following best practices like using the maximum allowed hashtags, balancing both branded and trending tags, and placing them throughout your content helps more users discover your posts and brand.
Run Hashtag Challenges
Social media challenges and user-generated content campaigns that invite audiences to interact with your brand in creative ways can create viral moments. You can launch UGC challenges with a dedicated branded hashtag like #ShowUsYour[Brand] or #[Brand]Challenge. Incentivize participation by committing to repost the best user submissions, award prizes and vouchers, or offer product discounts. Well-executed hashtag challenges inspire fans to create and share brand-related content that also spreads brand awareness.
Post Interactive Polls
Platform polling features like Instagram Polls, Twitter Polls, and LinkedIn Polls provide an easy way to prompt social engagement through fun, informal surveys and questions. Come up with intriguing lighthearted questions like “Which do you prefer – A or B?” or ask for opinions on current issues. Polls give followers a low-lift way to interact. They work well because the high visibility interaction rates boost your content’s algorithmic reach.
Go Live
Live streaming video introduces brands and company representatives in an authentic, unscripted way. You can announce plans for your broadcast across other social channels beforehand to drive tune-in. Fuel engagement by sharing behind-the-scenes footage, Q&As, company tours, Ask Me Anything sessions, new product launches, and more. The real-time reactions and influx of comments live video draws gives your content another viral boost.
Showcase Employees
User-generated content from actual employees, especially popular ones, helps humanize brands. Employees can post authentic photos, videos, Stories, Reels, and other content that gives a genuine inside look at your company culture. For example, Lush Cosmetics has individual retail store staff manage regional shop accounts where they post fun organic content. This builds localized followings.
Insert Strong CTAs
Including clear Calls-To-Action in your captions, videos, and images drives conversions from any viral social content by telling followers what you want them to do next. Your CTAs should speak directly to visitors by using action-driven language like “Shop Now”, “Sign Up Here”, “Book Today”, etc. Make sure to track clicks and engagement on posts with different CTAs to identify which wording resonates most with your audience.
Re-purpose Video Content
Maximize resources by repurposing your best performing video content across other platforms which increases visibility. For example, an engaging brand awareness TikTok clip could be truncated into a square video to also post on Instagram Reels. You could also convert vertical videos into landscape orientation for YouTube Shorts or IGTV. Remember to adjust the caption copy and hashtags for each individual platform.
Analyze Performance Metrics
Use social media management tools, analytics, and listening capabilities to dissect what content formats, post types, captions, hashtags, and posting times perform best for your brand. Study this data to identify the factors and patterns behind your top engaging and highest reaching content. You can replicate these success attributes in future content to continually improve overall engagement rates and reach more users.
Conclusion
Expanding social media reach and going viral requires consistency, creativity, persistence, and data-driven optimization. Brands that implement these strategies across their channels and closely analyze performance stand the best chance of creating viral moments. While reaching huge unpaid audiences may always include some element of luck, following these social media marketing best practices will dramatically increase the likelihood of success. Every brand can boost its awareness, engagement and sales through strategic viral content.
