13 strategies to boost your social media engagement
There are lots of social media platforms, and each has its own set of tips and tricks for boosting engagement. That said, here are 13 straightforward, best-practice guidelines and social media engagement tips.
1. Set clear goals and engagement KPIs
It sounds simple, but there’s so much social media performance advice out there that it’s easy to lose sight of the basics.
Before you think about how to increase social media engagement, make sure you’ve clearly identified your engagement key performance indicators (KPIs). That could be saves and shares, or comments and DMs. It could be an industry benchmark for conversions or a desired target for link clicks.
KPIs will, of course, vary from campaign to campaign and platform to platform. A restaurant seeking to drive foot traffic to a new location judges the success of its social media campaign differently from a luxury watch marque that wants to grow its brand awareness with a particular online demographic.
Once you’ve established your goals and KPIs, track performance over time using ’s analytics platform to get the insights you need to further refine and optimize your tactics.
2. Know your audience (and what makes them engage)
To know your audience, you must also know your platform. Understanding the qualities of a given platform helps shape content themes. For example, the report “Influencer Marketing Trends & Benchmarks: A Data-Driven Guide for 2025” shows that Instagram Reels’ quick hits of visually immersive storytelling are a great fit for lifestyle and fashion content. Conversely, YouTube, where longer-form material flourishes, is best for tech, education, and health content.
The next step is to understand the audience that’s interested in your content. Set up feedback loops to gather information about your users and their preferences. Ask questions, use polls to get a sense of what’s popular with your audience, and monitor replies to see what people are saying and what’s making them react.
3. Post when your audience is most active
Another tip that sounds simple but is often overlooked: Your audience can’t engage if they’re not around. Use optimizing apps like ’s best time to post tool to develop a posting schedule based on analysis of your target audience’s habits. Analytic tools are good at sifting data to identify the top seven times in a week when your posts attract the highest engagement—and they’re certainly quicker than trying to capture that data manually.
However you choose to do it, the benefit of optimizing posting time isn’t just that it maximizes engagement—it also maximizes early engagement, and early engagement encourages algorithm uplift. On Instagram, for example, the algorithm assigns higher value to posts that attract significant engagement in their first hour. Then, it amplifies them to a wider audience, whose engagement with the post might trigger another round of amplification.
Post when your audience is most active, and you not only boost engagement with your audience, but you also prompt the algorithm to push your content out to a whole new population of potential customers.
4. Use engaging captions with intentional CTAs
One of the best ways to increase social media engagement is to ask for it. Engaging captions that prompt action are a much better way to inspire your social media community to engage than passive slogans. “Save this for later” is an intentional call to action; “New post” is blandly informative.
It’s almost as simple as “you give what you get”: Keep your social captions lively and engaging to build a lively and engaged community around your content. Engagement starts by giving your audience something to engage with, and the right caption is often the perfect trigger for an active comments section.
Caption writing is a lot of work for overstretched social teams, but ’s caption generator can do a lot of the heavy lifting (or, rather, copywriting) for you. Sign up for a free trial and get started on quick and easy caption creation today.
5. Engage first—don’t just wait for replies
Be active with your commenting. Rather than relying on your followers to comment and reply to your posts, get out there and comment and reply on other posts—assuming they’re relevant to your brand and community. People who see your brand commenting on other posts may check out your profile and see what you’re posting on your own account.
And don’t leave comments and DMs on your accounts unattended. Be quick to respond and let the conversation flow. Users are more likely to engage if they know you’re seeing and acknowledging their comments, and they’re more likely to see that acknowledgement if you respond before other things capture their attention. An active comments section comes from responsive moderating.
6. Mix in interactive content (polls, sliders, Q&As)
Sometimes the question isn’t necessarily how to increase social media engagement, but rather how to get social media content to actually warrant engagement. Instagram Stories and Reels, and TikTok (especially TikTok) can very easily devolve into a passive stream of clips for the user. They might watch one 45-second snippet and move on—no engagement.
So how can you interrupt the ceaseless flow of content? By peppering your posts with engagement triggers. These can be polls, sliders, full-on Q&As: anything that encourages the user to stop scrolling and start engaging.
This strategy is particularly effective to improve engagement on Instagram, where native tools like quizzes and sticker taps can quickly add a new dimension to your content.
7. Make your posts visually scroll-stopping
The big social media platforms—Insta, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, even Facebook—are primarily visual platforms. And high-quality visuals will always be one of the most reliable ways to stop the scroll. A picture used to be worth a thousand words, but these days, a good picture is worth a thousand likes or two thousand shares.
Of course, you can’t magic up eye-catching visuals for every post. Even if you could, there would still be one or two that stood out from the rest. Aim for consistency and to stand out from the crowd of posts cluttering the stream. Branded templates and captions help your posts feel distinctive and ensure your content gets a second look.
8. Use carousels and short-form video for depth
When a platform gives you the chance to vary your posts, take it. Over on Instagram, Reels are the dominant post format. You must master the short-form storytelling format to be relevant on the platform. But Carousels get longer looks from users, so don’t forget to include them in your content plan to drive some longer, potentially higher-quality engagements on Instagram.
Conversely, it’s easy to regard YouTube as primarily the home for long-form video, but it’s almost two platforms in one: a library of long-form, in-depth videos and an increasingly popular collection of Shorts. And YouTube is keen to point to polling that shows 59% of Gen Z users say they use Shorts as the entry point for discovery of the subjects of their next long-form deep dive.
Shorts and Reels have more reach, encouraging more interaction, but Carousels and long-form videos attract higher times spent on post. Vary your content to get the most engagement on each social media platform.
9. Be consistent, not chaotic
Posting cadence—your content publishing schedule—is an important part of building momentum for your social media posts and attracting quality engagement. Different platforms and brands will have different recommended posting cadences. For example, generic advice suggests you should post Instagram Stories about twice daily, but post on TikTok around five times a week.
Ultimately, your strategy, resources, and knowledge of your audience will dictate the appropriate cadence for your campaign. The only rule that governs all situations is the one at the top of this section: Be consistent, not chaotic.
That’s easier said than done when you’re juggling multiple campaigns, influencers, and platforms. Fortunately, management tools like ’s content calendar give you a centralized dashboard to plan, schedule, and publish content across multiple platforms.
10. Use smart hashtag strategies
Hashtags boost reach, and increased reach boosts engagement, so there’s value in leveling up your hashtag game. Using a mix of tags helps engage three potential user groups:
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Trending hashtags:
Trending tags connect your content to what’s currently relevant on the platform, tapping into an audience looking for posts related to the trending topic. For a Thanksgiving sales promotion, you could use #BlackFriday or #CyberMonday, for example.
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Niche hashtags:
Niche tags speak to an audience that has a particular interest in a topic relevant to your content, regardless of whether it’s currently trending. These tags will be specific to a given subject, such as #socialmediamarketing.
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Branded hashtags:
Branded tags connect your content to your brand (and your audience). Someone looking for solid social media marketing advice might look for #, for example.
It can take significant time and effort to research hashtags, or you can use ’s hashtag suggestions tool to help you find relevant tags based on your content, industry, and audience.
11. Repurpose high-performing content
If your content performs well on one platform, share across your other socials.. Chances are that an idea that catches fire on TikTok might also reach an enthusiastic audience on Instagram. Take a viral Tweet and flip it into a Reel or Carousel, or send an Instagram Story out as a YouTube Short.
Use the content calendar to manage and track the repurposing of top posts across multiple platforms.
12. Study your past posts
With advanced, multi-platform analytic tools like ’s social media analytics, you can generate powerful insights from your past posts. Analytics help you to identify top-performing posts and spot the type, topic, and tone that drive the best engagement. With that information, you can create content pillars: core themes to guide your content creation toward posts that reliably resonate with your audience.
And as your audience’s interest evolves, your analytics will catch the changes and help you reshape and rethink your content pillars to ensure you stay relevant to your social media community.
13. Add a strong link in bio CTA
Link in bio is one of the most effective ways to turn social media followers into customers. ’s link in bio tool lets you amplify the effect with the ability to add custom buttons and backgrounds, featured banners, Mailchimp integrations, and even custom SEO tools.
The basic principle of link in bio is simple: Use engagement to funnel traffic directly from your social media profile to your product (or whatever it is you want them to see). It’s a powerful conversion tool, especially when you package it with a strong call to action. Don’t overlook this simple but effective way to encourage a passive audience to engage.
