If you’ve ever man­aged a social media mar­ket­ing cam­paign, you know just how time-inten­sive it can be. You’ll need to ded­i­cate hours every week to research­ing, post­ing, sched­ul­ing, and inter­act­ing with your audi­ence, and only after a span of months will you start to see momen­tum in your brand reputation’s growth.

There aren’t any short­cuts when it comes to max­i­miz­ing the long-term pay­outs of your cam­paign; you’ll need to invest in con­sis­tent qual­i­ty over an extend­ed peri­od of time if you want to earn the best results. How­ev­er, not all strate­gies take weeks, or even hours, to take effect. In fact, there are a hand­ful of strate­gies that can earn you new fol­low­ers in three min­utes or less:

1. Reach out to someone.

One of the eas­i­est ways to get a new fol­low­er is to reach out to a stranger. In many cas­es, sim­ply reach­ing out to someone—by fol­low­ing them and/or com­ment­ing on one of their posts—is enough to get them to notice you, and fol­low you back. The main caveat here is to ensure you aren’t spam­ming peo­ple; you’ll want to find peo­ple who might gen­uine­ly be inter­est­ed in your niche. Try look­ing at com­peti­tors’ fol­low­ers, and avoid lead­ing with a canned response.

2. Jump into an existing conversation.

You could also try jump­ing into an exist­ing con­ver­sa­tion. For exam­ple, if you find that a small clus­ter of peo­ple are talk­ing about a top­ic of rel­a­tive inter­est to your brand (such as using a rel­e­vant hash­tag), try join­ing the con­ver­sa­tion by using the same hash­tag. You could draw on your exper­tise to answer a user’s ques­tion, or chime in with your own per­spec­tive on the top­ic. Either way, you’ll have some indi­vid­ual inter­ac­tions, and you’ll increase your brand’s exposure.

3. Respond to an influencer’s question.

You could get more expo­sure by respond­ing to an influencer’s ques­tion; look for a high-pro­file user with thou­sands of fol­low­ers, and watch for ques­tions they sub­mit to the audi­ence. Give an answer, and you could instant­ly get seen by some of those fol­low­ers; if it’s a good answer, you’ll make a strong impres­sion with them, and a few will inevitably fol­low you as well.

4. Ask an influencer a question.

Con­verse­ly, you could get an influencer’s atten­tion by ask­ing them a ques­tion. See if you can start a friend­ly debate; get their opin­ion on a top­ic and present them with a few coun­ter­points. Debates tend to attract lots of atten­tion, and on an influencer’s scale, that could mean lots of fol­low­ers. Influ­encer-based con­tent tends to return 11 times the val­ue of oth­er forms of con­tent marketing.

5. Jump on a trending hashtag.

Take a look at some of the glob­al trend­ing hash­tags, and see if you can incor­po­rate one of them into your post. The caveat here is to avoid hash­tag stuff­ing, the prac­tice of includ­ing hash­tags for the sake of includ­ing hash­tags. Make sure you under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance and intent of each hash­tag, and only include it in one of your posts if it’s appro­pri­ate to do so.

6. Ask your followers a question.

Turn the atten­tion to your fol­low­ers and ask them a ques­tion about their thoughts, opin­ions, or pref­er­ences. Doing so is one of the best ways to gen­er­ate lots of inter­ac­tion, which will make your brand more vis­i­ble to each of their fol­low­ers in turn.

7. Take a shareable picture.

Images always per­form well on social media, and it shouldn’t take you long to snap a pic­ture of your envi­ron­ment. Try to make the pic­ture share­able in some way, either by mak­ing it enter­tain­ing or infor­ma­tive, or by incen­tiviz­ing your audi­ence to share it (such as with a con­test, or an imag­i­na­tive prompt).

8. Introduce yourself to a new community.

You can’t get new fol­low­ers unless you go new places – even online. Take two min­utes to find a new com­mu­ni­ty, whether it’s a social media group or a new web­site, and then take anoth­er minute to join in the con­ver­sa­tion. You’ll be sur­prised how quick­ly this move can get you new followers.

9. Meet someone in person.

Don’t under­es­ti­mate the social media fol­low­ing you can build by get­ting to know peo­ple in real life. If you have busi­ness cards or some oth­er way to quick­ly and eas­i­ly intro­duce peo­ple to your social media accounts, you could eas­i­ly gain a few dozen new fol­low­ers in the span of a sin­gle net­work­ing event.

10. Reference your social profiles in a guest post.

Final­ly, you can ref­er­ence your social media pro­files in a guest post you’re writ­ing. If you’re already estab­lished as a guest con­trib­u­tor, you can cite one of your own tweets or social posts in the body, and hope­ful­ly intro­duce some new read­ers to your social pres­ence. If you don’t have a guest author account, you’ll need to spend more than three min­utes acquir­ing one; try to find a niche pub­lish­er that match­es your brand’s indus­try or audi­ence, and make a pitch for some new site con­tent you could con­tribute. I’ve got a guide on exact­ly how to do it here.

These three-minute strate­gies aren’t designed to take you from 1,000 to 100,000 fol­low­ers overnight, and they can’t resus­ci­tate a fail­ing cam­paign all by them­selves, but they can give you a short-term, imme­di­ate boost with rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle effort or time.

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