Effective Social Media Tactics That Will Help You Grow Your Brand

Social media marketers often confuse strategy with tactics, leading to scattered efforts that fail to deliver meaningful results.

This blog bridges that gap so you can align your social media strategy with the right tactics and build a stronger brand presence.

Discover 13 social media tactics backed by real examples from brands that have turned their social media profiles into powerful growth engines.

What’s the difference between social media tactics and social media strategies?

Social media tactics and strategies may sound similar, but they are actually pretty different from each other. Learning how to approach social media marketing begins with understanding the critical difference between strategy and tactics.

Social media strategy is your overall plan for your brand’s social media. It answers broader questions like:

• Why is your brand trying to establish a presence on social media?
• What are your main social media goals?
• Who is your target audience?
• What platforms do you want to focus on?
• What kind of content should you be creating?
  

Social media tactics include specific actions that you need to take to execute your social media strategy. It answers more specific questions like:

• What type of post formats should you use (Carousels, Reels, Stories, single posts)
• What hashtags should you be using for maximum impact?
• What should be the main content pillars?
• What should be the time and frequency of your posts?

Aspect	Social Media Strategy	Social Media Tactics
Definition	The comprehensive plan that guides social media efforts toward business goals	The specific actions and methods used for the execution of social media marketing strategies
Focus	Long-term direction and purpose	Short-term implementation and execution
Answers	Why and what you want to achieve	How you'll achieve your goals
Timeframe	Long-term (6-12+ months)	Short-term (days, weeks, or months)
Components	Business objectives, Target audience definition, Brand positioning, Value proposition, Competitive analysis, Resource allocation, Key performance indicators	Content creation and curation, Posting schedule, Platform selection, Community management techniques, Hashtag usage, Specific campaigns, Engagement methods
Example	Increase brand awareness among millennials by 30% over the next year through authentic storytelling	Create weekly behind-the-scenes Instagram Stories, Post user-generated content every Friday. Respond to all comments within 2 hours. Use trending hashtags relevant to the audience
Measurement	Strategic KPIs (ROI, brand awareness, and customer acquisition)	Tactical metrics (engagement rate, reach, clicks, and comments)
Adaptability	Relatively stable adjusted quarterly or annually	Frequently adjusted based on performance data
Responsibility	Typically determined by leadership/management	Often executed by social media managers/specialists
Relationship	Guides and informs tactics	Support and implement strategy

Now that we know the main differences, let's take a look at the top social media tactics that you can employ to improve your business success.

#1. Outbound engagement with your customers or potential customers

Proactively interact with your audience instead of waiting for them to come to you.

Now, outbound engagement isn’t about interacting with just about any of your followers. It's about engaging with people in your specific niche, including prospects, industry experts, and existing clients. This can be through commenting on relevant posts, joining niche conversations, replying to Stories, or sending personalized messages.

Here are some of the many benefits of outbound engagement:

• Build genuine connections: It helps build genuine connections between you and your target audience.

• Take control of your audience growth: Instead of hoping for the algorithms to bring the right people to your brand’s profile, you can actively find and engage with the kind of people you’d want as your customers.

• Validate ideas in real-time: You can test your ideas in the comments section and gauge the reactions before turning them into full-scale posts.

• Expand your reach organically: The more you comment and engage, the more profile visits and follows you’re likely to get, especially when your input is thoughtful or valuable.

At Socialinsider, we implement outbound engagement on both Instagram and LinkedIn.

Our team actively comments, asks questions, and contributes to industry conversations.

Miruna, our social media manager, leads this effort, and some of her comments get up to 800 likes, even on posts that are not her own. That visibility alone drives more traffic back to our profile and grows our audience.

Initially, we tested this as a hypothesis to see if outbound engagement could boost brand visibility and follower growth. It worked so well that we now track it as a KPI and consider it a core part of our social media strategy.

I really love to send out personalized messages to all of the new followers. This really drives them in and retains their loyalty to following the account.
— Sharon Brand, Founder at Brand’s Media Group

#2. Leverage employee content

People trust people more than they trust companies. According to research, people are 3x more likely to trust company information when it's coming from an employee, as compared to a CEO.

You'll always gets more visibility with employee conteny because people follow people more than brands. Leo Reegan Vincentpaul, Senior Marketer @ Dexian

Training employees on personal branding is a proven social media marketing method to amplify brand authenticity and reach.

To encourage and empower your employees, you can:

• Train them on personal branding and platform best practices
• Share resources like templates, content calendars, and new product launches
• Offer incentives and recognition for good performance and consistent participation

At Socialinsider, we’re now making employee content a bigger part of our social media strategy. It’s clear that when employees share their perspectives, experiences, and expertise, it helps build trust, humanize the brand, expand the organic reach, and even attract new talent.

Our social media manager, Miruna, has started to share more about her personal journey—how she evolved from managing posts to becoming a true social media strategist.

Recently, she shared this LinkedIn post about what her usual day at Socialinsider looks like.

And we’re not alone in this approach. Other brands are leaning into employee-driven content, too.

We’re leaning into employee content a lot at Kit as well. I made a video interviewing creators at a conference. Posted it on our brand page on all platforms but LinkedIn, where I posted from my page (and reposted from the company page). – Thom Gibson, Social media & YouTube strategist at Kit

#3. Share BTS content

Sharing behind-the-scenes (BTS) content gives your audience an exclusive peek into what really goes on inside your company. It can humanize your brand and build a stronger emotional connection with your followers.

Here are a few creative ways you can use BTS content on social media:

• Show your product development journey: If your company is launching a new product or service, share the process with your audience. People love seeing the process of building a process and the teamwork that goes into delivering the end product. It’s real, unpolished, and relatable, too.

• Highlight your team’s daily work life: Show the everyday moments at the office–from team brainstorms to meetings, lunch breaks, and even birthday celebrations.
  

At Socialinisder, we’ve started a new office tradition where we celebrate the people behind the brand with a cake. It’s our way of saying thank you and bringing a little more fun into our everyday routine.

• Share your challenges and lessons learned: People love to see vulnerability and authenticity. Sharing mistakes, lessons learned, or moments when things didn’t go perfectly creates a deeper connection with your followers.

• Show how products are made or assembled: If your product involves any form of craftsmanship, production, or assembly, showcase the process in your social content. You could show factory processes or the quality checks your product goes through. This kind of BTS content builds trust in the brand and the product.

Remember, your BTS content doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be real.

#4. Integrate more short-form video content

Short-form video content (15-60 seconds) is now a powerful way to capture attention, deliver value quickly, and drive engagement.

In fact, short-form videos generate 1200% more shares than text and image posts combined.

TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are all showing higher engagement rates for this type of content, and there's a clear reason for this: short videos are quick to watch and highly engaging.

Here are some of the ways you can build more short-form content for your brand:

• Feature spotlights: Highlight specific tools or features of your product.

• Tips and tutorials: Teach users how to use your product more effectively with bite-sized how-tos.

• Thought leadership: Share POVs from your team on trends, tools, or industry predictions.

• Get on the latest trends: Your content doesn’t always have to be super serious. Use trending audio, challenges, or memes. Just make sure they align with your brand voice.

• Repurpose long-form content: Your short-form content doesn’t have to be created from scratch. If your brand regularly produces blog posts, podcasts, or YouTube videos, repurpose that content into bite-sized clips.

It’s time for organizations to level up with vertical videos, blending creativity with storytelling. Even regular news outlets are pivoting to vertical formats, while LinkedIn is going all-in on educational video content, reshaping how professionals learn and engage. – Diya Banerjee, WHO’s Head of Social Media

#5. Tag influencers and brands

Tagging relevant influencers or brands in your content helps reach new audiences, improves credibility, and builds valuable industry relationships. We see this tactic used in all kinds of verticals, and it's especially powerful when paired with genuine partnerships and useful content.

Here’s how to make the best out of this particular social media tactic

• Collaborate with micro influencers: 77% of all brand partnerships are with micro influencers. And here’s why: Micro influencers usually generate greater engagement. Start with identifying micro influencers in the same niche as yours and reach out to them to co-create short-form videos, Q&As, and other content.

• Tag brands you admire: Whether you're collaborating with a brand, mentioning them in a case study, or just showing appreciation, tag them for improved visibility and potential social media engagement.

We've started relying a lot on collabs—for a finance recruitment agency client, I focus on a lot of interviews with CFOs and finance directors, and it's resulted in a huge boost in engagement. It shows industry connections, expertise, and the algorithm loves it.” – Hristina Tsolova, Social Media Manager at The Marketing Optimist

#6. Rely on data-driven creativity

Data-driven creativity is about using social media insights to identify patterns and make creative decisions for building more engaging content.

So, instead of treating analytics as an afterthought, you bring it into the creative process from the start. Use them to understand what your audience actually engages with, spot emerging trends, and refine your tone, format, and style over time.

For instance, let’s say your carousel posts get more saves or your audience engages more with behind-the-scenes content. You can use this as a creative cue to build similar content.

To get clearer answers from your data, start by checking your platform analytics, using native tools or more advanced third-party tools.

• What formats perform the best (reels vs carousels vs static posts)?
• What are the best-performing posting times?
• Which topics, visuals, and hooks drive the most engagement?
• Which posts got the most shares, saves, or replies?

You can also use the data to experiment with different creatives and run A/B tests at the same time on similar audiences (especially in paid campaigns) to learn what works better.

#7. Incorporate GIFs, memes, and interactive content

If your social media feed feels a little too polished or static, your prospective customers may find it too difficult to connect with your brand. Use GIFs, memes, and interactive content to bring your brand’s personality to life.

You can mix these elements into your content strategy to make your brand more relatable and fun. Here are some social media tips:

• Meme-ify your brand messaging: Look at your existing content themes or brand messages, and then repackage them as memes that speak to your target audience. The memes could be about Monday blues, marketing struggles, or any other niche industry quirks.

• Use GIFs in your comments
  In comment sections or replies, use GIFs to add personality. It lightens the tone and reminds people that there’s a real person managing the brand’s communications.

• Run polls and playful prompts
  Combine memes or GIFs with polls (“Pick your mood”), “this or that” sliders, or quick quizzes in Stories to get people involved.

At Socialinsider, we’ve seen this tactic work firsthand. Based on our social media content pillars, memes consistently drive the highest engagement, making them a key part of our strategy.

#8. Track social media analytics

Social media analytics can actively guide your social media tactics and day-to-day decisions, right from identifying which formats drive engagement to spotting when your audience is the most active.

While native analytics are helpful, they don’t always show you the complete picture. You’ll find yourself switching between platforms, unable to combine data from multiple campaigns, and left without any insight into how your competitors are performing.

That’s where Socialinsider can help. It's a powerful, AI-driven social media analytics tool that lets you compare your brand’s performance across channels and even get competitor analysis.

By pulling everything into one place, Socialinsider helps you go beyond surface-level metrics and understand what’s really working in your industry.

Take a look at some of the main features of Socialinsider:

• Cross-platform analytics: Track analytics across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube through one dashboard.

• Content performance breakdown: See what types of content (Reels, Stories, Lives, carousels) drive the most engagement, reach, and follower growth.

• Analyze your content pillars: Socialinsider uses AI to automatically categorize your social media content into AI content pillars, which can help identify which content pillars resonate the most with your audience. You can also look into your competitors’ main content pillars.

• Optimal timing and posting insights: Know exactly when your audience is most engaged so you can schedule posts at the right time.

• Competitor benchmarking: Beyond analyzing your competitors' performance, you’ll get a clearer view of how your content compares across the industry. It can also help you uncover gaps, spot new opportunities, and set more realistic, data-driven KPIs. Use these insights to refine your marketing campaign tactics and stay ahead of industry trends.

• Custom-branded reports: Turn your social media analytics into beautiful, client-ready reports in minutes.

#9. Benchmark performance against competitors

Competitive benchmarking is another social tactic that is all about analyzing competitors to understand what they’re doing well on social media and where they’re going wrong.

The goal is to identify their top-performing content and the gaps in their strategies so your brand can improve.

You can compare key metrics like engagement, follower growth, content formats, and posting frequency to set realistic benchmarks for your own brand.

With competitive benchmarks, you can get more context into your brand’s social media performance.

• Is your engagement rate good, or just good for you?
• Are your followers growing faster or slower than your competitors?
• Are your competitors increasing video output or leaning into memes?
• What content themes are they pushing during peak sales season?

Here are the steps to implement competitive benchmarking

• Identify 3-5 key competitors: Choose brands with a similar audience, niche, or product offering.

• Track key metrics: Focus on engagement rate, follower growth, posting frequency, and content performance.

• Use social media analytics tools: Platforms like Socialinsider help you track competitor performance across different platforms and identify industry benchmarks.

• Analyze content themes: Look at top-performing posts, content pillars, and social media channels of your competitors.

• Use the insights: Use competitor benchmarks to build more informed content marketing strategies and A/B testing campaigns.

We've also found social listening and being aware of what the online chatter and headlines are to be essential. We've been more mindful about taking a step back when bigger issues are worrying our audiences and being ready to offer public health education when measles came back into our state.– Robbie Schneider, Director of US Communications, Health Tech Without Borders

#10. Have a value-first content approach

A values-first content strategy is about aligning your social media content with your brand’s core principles.

So, instead of directly pitching your products, you create content that provides value to your target audience, highlighting your brand’s authenticity and building solid emotional connections.

Socialinsider also uses a values-first approach by organizing its content around strategic content pillars:

• Entertainment & memes: Fun, trending memes that resonate with the social media community.

• Educational content: Social media tips, platform updates, and insights to help marketers grow.

• Original content and data: In-house research, benchmarking studies, and data-backed posts

With Socialinsider, you can easily organize and analyze your social media posts using AI-powered content pillars.

It automatically categorizes posts under different pillars, but you also have the flexibility to create custom content pillars and manually tag posts to them.

Whenever you view a post in your Socialinsider dashboard, you’ll see a ‘Tag Post’ option right below it.

You can either select an existing pillar from the list or create a new one by clicking ‘Add Content Pillar’. Once tagged, the post will be grouped into that pillar.

From there, you can dive into detailed analytics for each content pillar to better understand what’s driving engagement and refine your content strategy even further.

#11. Focus on platform-specific content formats

Every social media platform has its own unique audience, behavior patterns, and algorithm preferences. To get the algorithms on your side, you need to understand what drives success on each platform.

By tailoring your content to fit the native format of each platform, you can boost both reach and engagement. Think long-form articles on LinkedIn, aesthetic visuals on Instagram, or quick updates on X (formerly Twitter).

Yet, many brands still overlook this. According to our LinkedIn Benchmarks report, 1 in 3 posts includes an external link, even though posts that keep users on the platform typically perform better.

Social networks prioritize zero-click content: content designed to deliver value without requiring a click-through. Adapting your format to each platform’s preferences isn’t just about engagement. It’s about working with the algorithm, not against it.

Here’s a breakdown of our own content strategy from Q1, where we prioritized text posts and multi-image carousels (formats that LinkedIn’s algorithm tends to favor):

#12. Repurpose and cross-post content

Content creation can be time-consuming and resource-heavy, but you don’t always have to churn out new content to maintain a consistent social media presence.

By repurposing and cross-posting content, you can breathe new life into existing material and keep your social media calendar full.

But remember: repurposing content isn’t just about reposting the exact same content all over again. It's about repackaging your valuable content in different formats that resonate with each platform’s unique audience and algorithm.

For instance, we turned this well-performing blog about social media interactions into an infographic for social media.

#13. Go live with real-time videos

Live video is one of the best ways to connect with your audience on a personal level, in real-time.

Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok prioritize live content, giving it more visibility.

Whether it’s a product launch, a Q&A session, or behind-the-scenes (BTS) content, live videos create authenticity and foster instant engagement.

Here are some live video marketing ideas:

• Product demos and launches
• Live Q&A sessions
• Behind-the-scenes (BTS) moments
• Live events or pop-ups
• Customer testimonials and success stories

Final thoughts

Your social media success hinges on aligning your overall strategy with the right marketing tactics to execute it. To stay ahead, you also need to pair these tactics with the right tools that can transform insights into action.

Socialinsider offers AI-driven analytics, competitor intel, and cross-platform insights to refine your social media approach and help you make data-driven decisions. Ready to turn strategy into scalable wins? Try Socialinsider today!