There are many different ways that companies market their products or service and even brand on social media. Sometimes companies get stuck in their normal ways to utilize their social media accounts, so here are 24 social media strategies to try and implement for your business.
1. Research Your Target Audience
“A big mistake any marketer can make is assuming who their target audience is. Knowing your target audience can help you run all your marketing strategies smoothly. This is because you will know which platforms and tactics work for each audience, and it'll be easier to know which ones to tackle and which ones to leave on the back burner. Spending time on this step will ensure you don't have to go back to the drawing board when coming up with ideas.”
-Brandon Brown, CEO of Grin.co
2. Don't Get Myopic
“Social media is always changing. Marketers often miss this but can use this to their advantage. Understanding that what worked yesterday might not work today is crucial in a successful social media strategy. Using data and keeping an eye out for new trends can help you stay on the cutting edge of social media marketing. As social media continues to evolve every day, stay updated, keep an open mind, and change your trajectory when necessary.”
-Jeffrey Pitrak, Marketing and Account Manager, Transient Specialists
3. Share your Brand’s Unique Story
“A branding strategy we implemented was beginning to release messages from our founders and employees. Using this method is a great way to showcase company culture. Sharing within the industry, establishing expertise on a given topic, educating the target audience about a particular subject, and making a human connection is where you will start to attract new potential employees and leads. By using these videos on our website, social media, and news feed, it’s helped increase brand awareness, and increase traffic to our blog and landing pages, along with increasing conversions on our website as a whole. Which has led to us being able to build trust and credibility for our brand when attracting genuine consumers that would like to learn about our products and talent that would like to work with us.”
-Connor MacDonald, CMO at Ridge
4. Remaining Consistent
“Consistency is something many marketers often forget is so important for their business. How frequently you post is very important, because it shows you are engaged with your audience and care to keep them updated. Every platform is different in the way that you need to be consistent, and it is useful to look into recommendations other marketers have made about specific platform posting strategies. It is important that you post numerous times over the course of a month+ long period, instead of posting a couple times in a day and forgetting about it. Be sure to look at the timing, frequency, and volume of your posts to ensure the best results. Viewers will always respect a company who keeps up with their social media accounts rather than a company who posts every once in a while.”
- Megan Jones, Community Outreach Manager at NutraSweet Natural
5. Use Your Audience
“The quickest and easiest way to create great content on social media for your business is to share posts and pictures from your customers. Along with that, you should never hesitate to show off your company’s products & services. Lastly, engaging with your audience always makes for great content. Whether you're sharing a good review, asking a customer how their experience was, or giving tips to commonly asked questions, your core audience is always there for you to create quality content with.”
- Kate Lipman, Sales & Marketing Consultant at embrace
6. Create Useful Graphics
“Easily shareable, informative graphics are a great way to get your business out there. If your brand has expertise on a specific subject, design eye catching infographics that publications, blogs, or other sites can post to educate their audience. These can create brand recognition and cement your organization as an authoritative source.”
-Andrew Grant, Cofounder and Head of Marketing at Dutch
7. Be Sure to Use the Right Platform
“Marketing on social media can do wonders for your business, but all the work you put into your social media campaign could quickly go to waste if you’re not sharing your content to your target audience. Choosing the right social media platform can help make or break your campaign. Giant brands, such as Apple, Nike, Walmart, etc. are big enough to have a target audience on any given social media platform. But if your business has an audience that is more specific, you need to factor in what platform that audience is most likely using.”
-Himanshu Agarwal, SVP of Solutions at WorkBoard
8. Use What Makes Your Company Different
“If you’re looking into how to plan your company’s social media marketing strategy, first you want to really get to know your product. I’m sure you know who your competitors are, but you want to really define what sets your product or service apart from your competitors and highlight it in every campaign. If your potential customers clearly know what makes your company different because it is being shown off in your social media strategies, then you ensure that potential customers know to go to your company for that thing that sets you apart.”
Alex Schmitt, Digital PR Specialist at Save the Children
9. Connect With Your Followers
“Even if you have a dedicated social media team, a social media marketing strategy, and post consistently to your various social platforms, nothing matters if you’re neglecting to connect with your followers online. Communication is a two-way street, and it’s important to actively listen to what your audience is saying and respond. Pay attention to the conversations they are having under your pieces of content and amongst themselves, off your page, to better understand their interests, concerns, and pain points. Showing that you genuinely care about your audience goes a long way.”
Adrian Pereira, Co-Founder at Eco Pea Co.
10. Test and Follow the Data
“Gathering data and testing your social media marketing campaigns, such as doing A/B tests, are key to any successful marketing campaign and data from these tests should be analyzed and explained for further social media campaigns! Even doing a quick mock/test marketing campaign and gathering data from this can give you a lot of insight on what kind of content your audience is most attracted to, how receptive certain campaigns are compared to others, should you have more organic or paid content, should I run more advertisements, what kind of advertisements are most effective, etc. Any good marketing campaign will have the data out and analyzed for insight and preparations even before any work goes into the actual content itself.”
-Alex Bell, Outreach Specialist at 1-800-Pack-Rat
11. Keep Your Accounts Up To Date
“Keeping all of your social media accounts up to date with the correct information for your business is something that companies overlook. Companies may find that they only really have a large following on specific platforms, but still keeping those smaller accounts up to date will leave a positive impact on potential customers. There is always a chance that one of those smaller accounts could potentially blow up and achieve a massive following, so being prepared for that is very important.”
Rich Rudzinski, Founder and Technical Strategist for Oversight.co and Tragic Media
12. Know-How to Correctly Time Your Change
“Marketing is known for being an ever-changing realm, especially social media. In today’s day and age, there will always be a new trend or platform to learn about. For a business, it is vital to understand when the right time is for you to change or switch over platforms. The best thing you can do is monitor your competitors and their results. As much as you may want to be the first person to hop on the new trend, it can be risky. Therefore, by watching your competitors try and adapt to new trends, you can measure their success and see how you can better implement the strategy for your company. On the other hand, if the trend or change is within your company’s niche then it is best to try and be the first company to change and adapt. Furthermore, by monitoring trends, competitors, and platforms, you will become more aware of how to implement those changes for your success.”
Aaron McWilliams, Director of Marketing at 1Dental
13. Create Engaging Content
“Marketers often focus all their content creation around their brand and making their company seem more appealing. Sometimes, the best content is not brand-specific but focused on educating or entertaining your audience. This could be stories from other thought-leaders in your industry, or commenting/resharing viral videos and posts from your industry.”
Jonathan Finegold, Sr. eCommerce Manager at MedCline
14. Promote your Socials
“A company may have great social media profiles and create great content, but if they don’t promote these socials this content is going to waste. You should be placing buttons or links for your socials in all articles, emails, and your homepage! Additionally, you should be running ads across your social profiles promoting your brand as well as your other profiles. This will help you gain your initial following so they can see your wonderful content and spread it themselves.”
Brooke Wilson, Community Outreach Manager at Fabric
15. Try Influencer Marketing
“If you have the budget, finding a batch of influencers that relate to your business field and working with them to promote your product can boost your business exponentially. The power of social media is huge and by tapping into that power as best you can, then you can find a lot of success. That being said, it can be expensive to partner with influencers depending on how big of a following they have. Large influencers can charge an arm and a leg to promote a product but the amount of people they will reach with that promotion can be way better than any other advertisement on the internet.”
Chris Hunter, Director of Customer Relations for ServiceTitan
16. Create a Variety Of Content
“Flooding your social media with the same content over and over will only bore your customers. Focusing on providing a variety of different content across all social media platforms will leave a much more positive impact on customers. Creating helpful videos, infographics and photos will improve the way your business looks in people’s eyes. It can be helpful to create a content calendar so you know when to create certain types of content and it allows you to space out your content in a way so it feels like you are not flooding your social media.”
Gregg Dean, Co-founder and CEO of Layla Sleep
17. Don’t Over-Sell
“These days, people don’t want to be sold on things, specifically on social media. Traditional marketing is, for the most part, out the window, and customers are now looking to create a connection with you. A customer that trusts a business will buy from a said business, and vice versa. That’s the key to social media marketing – forming and establishing a relationship with your customer. On social media, consumers will find it off-putting if your brand is overpromoting itself. Instead of trying to sell your goods on social media, try to create helpful and entertaining content that users would want to consume. This type of content can drive customers to your products and services, without making them feel like they were sold on anything.”
-Brandon Hulme, Product Management Lead at Deputy
18. International Audiences
“If your company is international, don’t forget to market outside of the United States. Other countries are going to have different marketing strategies that work for them, along with different time zones, language barriers, and general demographics. Make sure that you take these factors into consideration when you develop a social media strategy for your business.”
Sanem Ahearn, Head of Marketing at Colorescience
19. Create a Community
“Social media is a great way to hear from your target audience. It is important that you are creating engaging content, relevant campaigns and stay consistent across all your channels. Each social media channel has a different targeted age group, so their messaging should be tailored to that specific community. Engaging social media and community management is an authentic way to communicate with your community and hear what valuable feedback they have to say.”
Jason Brandt Customer Success Director at Podopolo
20. Create a Feedback Loop
“Let your customers be heard. Ask for input from your community, what types of posts do they want to see? Should they be informational, interactive, repostable or sharable. Ask them what they are wanting next out of your community. Create Q & A sessions, open your Instagram up for discussion posts, or collaborate with an expert influencer in your field. Using feedback from your audience is a great way to know how to please your audience. Feel free to launch responsive campaigns with user-generated content asking for specific requests you deliver on. Creating a feedback loop where you customers and potential customers feel heard and interacted with is a great social media strategy that marketers often miss.”
Jacob Dayan, CEO and Co-founder of Community Tax
21. Let Your Community Shine
“Social media is a great way to engage with your community, and let that community shine. A trend that is taking over the social media world is UGC, or user-generated content. Content creators across the web loved being featured and shouted out on social media. Whether you are simply reposting Instagram stories you are tagged in, creating infographics with customers’ comments or editing together an Instagram Reel under a branded hashtag, UGC is a great way to include community members and let them shine.”
Tom Mumford, co-founder of Undergrads LLC
22. Humanize your Brand
“In today’s social media age, users on social platforms are very critical about transparency when it comes to brands they follow as they want to show loyalty to companies that identify with their beliefs & ideals. One tip that I have to show personality within your social media campaigns would be to give an inside look into how your business runs & operates. You want to share how your services/product is helpful to your community as consumers are more likely to stand behind a service/product that has given back in a positive way. Building that trust with your targeted consumers will only help your brand grow.”
Sacha Ferrandi, Founder at Source Capital
23. Stay on Top of Trends
“Staying on top of social media trends can prove itself to be difficult if you're not chronically online. However, it's important to make sure you're paying attention to the trends as these are rapidly changing and what's trendy one day can be seen as outdated the next. The bright side is that if you're keeping updated with these, you can always use these to your advantage to create relevant content which will help you get noticed.”
Daniel Ward, Editor at Invoice2go
24. Research The Competition
“To be successful in any sphere you have to know the competition. After all, you already face competition everywhere. In the business world, you have to have a clear understanding of your competitors – what they sell, their reputation, their price, what they offer over your product, and much more. Researching your competition is a very powerful tool for developing a powerful social media strategy. Diving deep into your competitors will help you write a better profile, stand out from the crowd and attract more attention from your target audience.”
Chris Panteli, Founder of LifeUpswing
25. Building Aspiring Relationships
To truly connect with talent remotely, there is a need to be genuine and real through the screen. You’ll want to keep in touch with top candidates for potential opportunities, especially for a small business. For qualified talent you don’t want to lose, consider meeting with them informally every so often. Then, once you do have open positions for these prospective applicants, they’ll remember the effort you put into building the relationship and be more interested in applying. By thinking creatively with your hiring efforts, you can set your team up for success now and in the future. This potentially leads to building stronger relationships and keeps trust high.
Dhruv Sampat, Founder of Studypaq
Related: Free AppExchange Resource
Again, here are amazing and unique ways to implement new social media strategies into your day-to-day business routine. From creating feedback loops to collecting any relevant data, any and all of these tips are going to be beneficial to your company.