So we’ve built you a beautiful social media presence and your posts are doing a great job of reflecting your brand. How can you attract new followers and more engagement? Hint: It’s NOT using hashtags.
Do Hashtags Work?
Early social media algorithms depended on hashtags to help users find the content they were craving. Today, those algorithms have advanced far beyond the old #methods. Today, creating quality content is more important than hashtag-stuffing your posts.
In 2025, SEO stands for more than just search engine optimization; it really means search EVERYWHERE optimization. This means that we use keyword research and thoughtful SEO methods when crafting any kind of digital content — social media captions included. This approach, combined with methods to drive engagement, is what will help your content find new readers.
In the meantime, hashtags are both ineffective and dated. (There’s no better way to look like you’re straight out of 2015 than being #blessed.) While we do not support all of his opinions, Elon Musk put it perfectly in a recent post on X:
How to Get More Followers
Just like in real life, the best way to win friends and influence people on social media is to seek out moments of genuine connection. At BuzzFactory, we take care of a lot of this for you. If you want to grow your social presence even more, however, there are a few easy ways that you and your team can boost efforts.
Being a good social butterfly does not mean randomly following dozens of accounts. (That will get you frozen or even banned, in some cases.) Instead, we talk about following The 5-3-1 Rule to help drive engagement: Like five posts, leave three comments, and you should get one new follower as a result.
This is a longstanding “golden rule” of socials and it has become a little less effective over time as social media engagement has become more and more common. However, it’s still a good guideline for bringing extra eyes to your content and an easy way for you or your team to add on to our own engagement efforts.
