Social Media Marketing: 250 Social Media Strategies [2020]

• Updated on: 2020-08-27
• Read original article here

Social Media Marketing: 250 Social Media Strategies [2020]
By Carlos Trillo / Updated: July 2, 2020
Want better social media marketing results?
If you’re looking for social media tactics that work in 2020, then you’ll get what you want in this post!
Because today you’re going to see 250 actionable social media strategies and techniques.
So let’s get started!
Contents
Chapter 1
Social Media Audit
Auditing your current social media efforts is the best way to improve your performance. A social media audit tells you what’s working in your social media strategy and what’s not. It is a crucial step to produce positive ROI and optimize your efforts.
Make sure everything is going as planned and if not rethink your social media plan once again.
The following strategies will help you during your social media audit:
1. Gather as much information as possible
Collecting your data from all the social media analytics tools you use helps you to conduct an in-depth analysis. So be thorough. Dig into the data as much as you can to see how you’re performing.
2. Use a social media audit template
A social media audit template makes it easier for you to evaluate your social media marketing efforts. Seeing all your social media activities in one place allows you to compare your performance in each platform. Keep your data organized for discovering new areas of your improvement.
3. Locate all your social media platforms
Do you have social accounts that you used a long time ago but you’re not using them anymore? Including these inactive profiles, check all the social media platforms. Then identify in which platforms your audience could be. This process can uncover potential platforms and business opportunities.
4. Be aware of new social media platforms
As I mentioned before, it is important to understand all the social media platforms including the ones you’re not using. Especially the new ones that people start using. It may have great potential to get a bigger movement, and you can be an early adopter.
5. Optimize your social media profiles
Source: Twitter – Starbucks
After checking your social media accounts, you must optimize your social media profiles. Check all the profiles if they have a consistent bio, URL, and images. Matching the look helps users to recognize your brand across platforms.
6. Spot and check your competitor’s profiles
It is also essential to know your competitors’ strategies for social media profiles and contents. Take some time to spy your competitors’ work and get some ideas for creating better social presences.
7. Identify the influencer of your niche
Not broad topics but your niche, look for influencers that share what you’re talking about. Knowing what they are doing and what information they post on social media helps you to improve your contents and grow your social networks.
8. Get ideas of the influencer’s branding
Influencers normally have strategic plans for social media marketing. Find what types of posts got big engagements, what images they are using, how they try to reach more followers. They have many answers that you can take.
9. Review your best posting time
When you audit your social posts, you may get ideas of your optimal time to post. Sometimes it can be different from the best time that your analytics tells you.
10. Compare your audience across platforms
This is important to see if your social media efforts are consistent across all the platforms. Because if your audience has different needs, you may have different ways of social engagement.
11. Analyze your follower growth
When you continuously grow engagements, the numbers of your followers should increase. If you cannot see a followers growth, you may be posting valueless contents for your audience.
12. Identify fake followers
It is hard to check but you should know if you have fake followers or not. Like the people who are inactive for 90 days and the people who don’t interact on your latest 50 posts. If you’re following those people, you can unfollow and follow more real users.
13. Understand your social traffic
Go check your social traffic on Google analytics. The social traffic resource will tell you which platforms drive the most. You can integrate that social media network with the other ones for cross-engaging.
14. Make your images and messages consistent
When you create contents, make sure you deliver consistent branding posts on social media. Adding your logo or using your brand colors on your posts can create a consistent brand image. Also, be careful about your tone when you assign different people.
15. Discover your top performance posts
Identifying your top performance posts is very helpful for your future content marketing. It tells you what types of posts your audience likes, engages and goes to your website for more details.
16. Evaluate your growth by percentage compared with the previous time
It is essential to understand your growth by percentage when you analyze data. It makes it easier for you to compare with previous audit times.
17. Don’t forget about specific platform metrics
Each social media platform has different rules and style. So you should add those uncommon metrics in your social media audit template. For example, you want to have a # of Retweet for Twitter, and # of downloads for YouTube.
18. Calculate your monthly ROI
My recommendation for the social media audit period is monthly. Calculating ROI monthly gives you great insights into your social media performance. Since it tells you what’s not working, you can develop different strategies before it’s too late. It avoids investing in things that have no value for you.
19. Determine if you should keep or delete your account
When all the audit finishes, it’s time to decide whether you keep an account that you’re not using and/or has no potential growth for your business. If you have no plan for that channel, you can delete it. But if you have an account with the exact name of your business, you may want to keep it (only if people use the channel actively).
20. Create new objectives and goals from the analysis
While doing a social media audit, you may come up with new objectives. Which platforms are outperforming others? Social media audit is a great opportunity to find out your strengths and weaknesses. Depending on these findings, set new goals and make plans to perform your best.
Chapter 2
Social Media Plan
It is critical to have clear goals and develop strategies for social media marketing.
A social media marketing plan is a practical tool to meet your goals for the long term. Since social media is not a quick remedy to produce stable results, you need to develop a strategic plan.
Above all, a social media marketing strategy is a core fundamental of your game plan. It should be the outline of all the activities you plan to succeed.
Here is the list of our top tips for your social media marketing strategy.
In addition you can check some other Social Media Marketing Ideas that will help you succeed in your social media strategy.
21. List out your SWOT for your social media marketing
A SWOT analysis for your social media marketing gives you a bigger picture of your game. It uncovers possibilities and challenges for your social media marketing.
22. Set realistic and reachable goals
To transform desired goals into actions, check if your goals are achievable. Having big goals is not bad, it isn’t genuine to pursue them in social media marketing strategies. Think about something you want but you can reach with efforts. It will allow you to measure your performance better.
23. Establish specific goals that align your business objectives
It is important to embrace your business goals in each marketing activity. It helps you to prove the quality of your social media marketing and support your overall marketing goals.
24. Determine your key metrics for your goals
When setting your social media marketing goals, you should think about how you have already tracked. It encourages you to refine the goals and polish the strategies that work.
25. Design your online customer services in social listening
Social listening is about monitoring the social conversion related to you. It is one of the primary processes in social media marketing. Design how you conduct social listening to offer better customer services and manage your reputation on social media.
26. Brainstorm how you influence on social media
Social influence is critical for your brand to earn credibility and trust. The contents of your social posts will not only share information but also create a brand image in the audience’s minds. Compose your contents and share posts that can give your business credits.
27. Seek the best way to connect your followers and influencers
Social networking is another important process. Creating a social networking strategy allows you to find your target audience and connect with them on social media. To establish solid networks on social media is not so easy. Take initiative actions on social media like commenting and sharing.
28. Plan for Social Selling to convert people
Social selling is the most challenging part of social media. It generates new leads and converts your audience effectively. You can incorporate it within your promotion strategy.
29. Develop strategies that support your weaknesses
What are your difficulties with social media? Find solutions that cover your weaknesses and develop your strategies. As you know, your weakness is your potential strength!
30. Don’t miss opportunities in your strategies
Opportunities in SWOT are external positive possibilities that may grow your business. It helps you to gain additional benefits. Why not include them in your social media strategies?
31. Create strategies for each social media platform
As every social network has a different style and winning formulas, you need to apply different strategies. They share common techniques but creating strategies for each platform can pinpoint your targets.
32. Craft strategies that add value to or entertain your target audience
Many businesses fail social media marketing because their posts are not customer-focused. Social media is the place where you can get connections with customers and your target audience. Don’t sell out your business, share value proposition that they can enjoy.
33. Invest in social media marketing tools
Managing social media marketing activities requires so much time and work. Invest in social media marketing tools is a wise choice. It will allow you to save lots of time, so you will have more time for improvements and a right execution.
34. Leverage the right social media tools in each phase
Source: Neil Patel
Right social media tools allow you to perform your best. Well-research, test and leverage them. You will be able to obtain new users, expand your reach, and increase engagements depending on the tools.
35. Gather as many resources as possible in your budget
Do you have enough time and people from planning to analyzing your efforts? You can have minimal resources but if you don’t have enough, it’s hard to make your social media marketing work. For successful execution, you need to provide enough resources.
Chapter 3
Profile Optimization
Social media profile is the face of your social business. It tells your concise information and shows your branding style. A great social media profile gives people a reason to connect with you and engage with your contents.
These are practical tactics to polish your social media profiles:
36. Make a good first impression
The first impression is fundamental because it determines whether people follow you, check more posts, and engage with you. Let’s focus more attention on details and seek the best way to show who you are.
37. Identify what other profile does to catch your attention
Source: Twitter – Hootsuite
For making a good impression, you can get some inspiration from other users. Check what grabs your attention to the social profiles through the channel. It can be the graphics, tone, behind the scenes, and more. Get some ideas to improve your profiles from others.
38. Learn from what others are missing
On the other hand, you can also check what keeps you away. That avoids you giving the same impression to your audience on your profile. For example few people like these lengthy sentence posts and improper images.
39. Fill out everything in your profile if possible
Source: Facebook – Ahrefs
Some social media platforms allow you to add more information like your interests and skills. In particular, you can ask people to write recommendations about you on LinkedIn. The more information you have, the more people can learn about you and relate to you.
40. Get a username so that people can search for you
Is your username the word people search for you? It is very important to have a name that is searchable and recognizable for your audience. If you’re using a different username from your brand’s name, you’re missing the opportunities to get connected with your leads and customers.
41. Try to keep the same username across platforms
By using the same username across platforms, you have more chances that people find you. My recommendation is to get a username you like in all the social media platforms that works for your brand. Even now if you don’t have time and budget for a specific social media channel, you can take it for the future use if necessary.
42. Add a profile image so that people recognize you
Source: Twitter – Brian Dean
Similarly, a profile image also has to be recognizable. As most companies use their logo on the social media profile image, you should consider what is the most recognizable image for your profile. In case people recognize your representable person rather than the company logo, then it would be appropriate to use the person’s face photo. Make sure the photo is professional.
43. Use the right size for social media profile images
Each social media channel has different size requirements for a profile image. Using the different size of image dimensions can cause less engagements and CTRs. Check this ultimate guide to social media image sizes to optimize your images for your social media profile. 
44. Add a cover image or background image
Source: Twitter – Sprout Social
Particularly, you should be extra careful with bigger images. The cover image and background image can impact whether users engage with you. On Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Tumblr, you can show these bigger images and provide extra branding image. Why not add? Here are the right cover image size tutorials .
45. Don’t make the larger image distracting
Larger images on social media such as a cover image and a background image drive engagements. But if your images are distracting to read and see your contents, it will push your audience away. Make sure that your bigger image conveys the branding message but it doesn’t disturb what users are doing.
46. Give a meaningful description in your bio
It’s obvious that you cannot write everything you’d like to say in your social media bio. But you need to offer a reason to follow you in the bio. Provide who you are and what you do at least in your bio. You may want to use emojis to visually appeal and be eye-catching.
47. Make sure to use keywords and phrases in your profile
Source: Twitter – Evinex
Most of the search engines use the bio in social media profile for the results. To optimize your social media profile for SEO, using your keywords and phrases in a bio is a must. It will increase the chances your leads and customers can find you from search engines!
48. Build your credibility with your skills
In your bio, you can also include your skills and professional achievements to build your credibility. People don’t follo untrustworthy users. Don’t be one of them! Also, like in LinkedIn, you can get endorsements for your skills. That makes you look resourceful to other users.
49. Add call-to-action in your bio
Source: Instagram – Brand24
Adding a call-to-action in your bio helps you to draw users to your links. Such as your website, landing page, blog, app, and etc. You can guide users directly from your bio to a specific URL that you provide.
50. Provide key contact details
Source: Facebook – Inffinit Hotel
Offering key contact information in your profile makes it easier for your audience to take actions. Contact details on your profile make it easy for users to find ways to contact you. It will increase your chances to get calls, emails, or even users may visit your physical address.
51. Don’t forget your URLs
Likewise, most of the platforms allow you to add an URL. Using this link on social media is a critical way of leading users to a specific web page. It can be your home page, a landing page, a blog post, a promotional campaign page… You can even put your other social media networking sites. Don’t miss this great opportunity that encourages more engagements.
52. Remain consistent in profiles across platforms
Consistency is key to successfully transport your branding. Not only your messages but also the colors of your image gives more clues of your brand. Remember to have consistency across your channels.
53. Show personality (but not too much)
Although LinkedIn has a more formal and professional style, on most social media platforms you can be casual. Have humor and build relationships like in real life. But have a good balance between showing personality and keeping professional.
54. Change the main URL if you have promotions
Source: Instagram – Evinex
As I mentioned before, when you publish your new blog post and you want to promote, you can change the main URL to the specific URL. Especially in the platforms where you cannot attach an URL in the post like Instagram. You can add the CTA like “Check it out (link in bio)!” in your post and guide users directly to the page (skipping unnecessary navigations).
55. Link to your other social channels
Offering different social channels gives users more options to connect with you. And it increases the chances to engage with users. People have some preferences for social networks like you do. So let them choose your channel by providing some options to stay in touch.
56. Make sure that your links work
When you add links on social media, you always need to make sure that your links work. Double-check if your links work and seek the best way to drive people to the link!
57. Update your profile regularly
Don’t you show old marketing messages in your profile? Keeping your bio information up-to-date is a must. Every time you change something about your company’s strategies or anything, update your profile information in all the platforms.
58. Check your privacy settings
You can show all information you have there with the audience. But if you have something you don’t want to show to certain people, use your privacy settings to hide it. It allows you to control who can see your specific contents and comment on them. Or even you can manage who can search you and who can follow you.
59. Consider your photo tagging settings
As you know, on social media people can post about you and even tag you on images. It means anyone can create your social image and you need to take care of it. Especially when you allow people to tag you on images, you should know not all of them are your favorite. Always check if the photo doesn’t hurt your image. If it’s too much work, you can manage these situations with tagging settings.
60. Make sure that your website has a way to follow your social channels
Source: Evinex
Don’t forget to promote your social media on your website. As you should promote your website from your social media platforms, the same goes for the promotions from your website. More followers on social media, more conversion on your website.
61. Promote your social media profile information in your email marketing
You can encourage your subscribers to connect with you on social media for getting instant updates from you. You can add your social media links in your email signature or social follow links in the newsletter.
62. Change your password regularly
Identity theft is on the rise. Whether it’s a personal or a business account, you may have a lot of private information in the account. To avoid getting your account hijacked, I recommend you to change your password at least once a month.
Chapter 4
Target Audience Research
When it comes to social media marketing, it is critical to deliver your contents to the right targets.
For successfully doing it, first you need to define who is your target audience and set strategies that help you to connect with them.
Without audience research, you won’t be able to produce valuable contents for them and it will minimize your marketing performance.
These are my actionable tips for managing your audience:
63. Define who your target audience is
Developing an audience persona makes it easier for you to perform marketing strategies and connect with them in an effective way. So, have specific personas and check their behavior on social media. Depending on the persona, you can tailor your posts and strategies to be able to connect with your target audience.
64. Check your competitors’ followers
Many times happens you’re going to find the perfect people when you spy on your competitor’s social media profile. They might be your competitor’s customers but they are the people who like to see contents of common topics.
65. Find the key demographics of your target
Like gender, age, and location, key demographics allow you to create better contents and connect with them. For example, if you know most of your target audience lives in California, you can consider when to send real-time contents.
66. Look at which platforms your target audience hangs out
You know your target audience. Then it’s time to find where they spend time on social media. Check the major social media platforms including the ones which you don’t use. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. List out where you find your target audience and what they do. It will help you to make wise decisions for your target platforms.
67. Know when your target audience is active
When you observe your target audience on social media, check when they are spending time there. It tells you when is the best time for you to post and interact with them. This is very important to increase your engagement and expand your reach.
68. Listen to what your target audience is talking about
Social listening is one of the most important strategies in social media marketing. Get a picture of what problems they have, what they have interests for, and what are their goals. Then, all you have to do is to create content that meets their needs and appeals to them!
69. Learn the tone of your target audience
You should use the tone and the words that your target audience uses to understand each other. So, when you conduct audience research you should focus on what words they use for some words that you normally use differently. If you use terminology, many people who don’t know about these word so much will get lost in your talk. Tailor your tone aligning to your target audience languages.
70. Identify who your target audience is interacting with
You can also check who your target audience is talking to, and what tools they are using. From this key behavior, you can see their real intention of using social media too. If what you do is not suitable for your target audience, you may need to rethink your targeting.
Chapter 5
Competitors Research
Competitor research is key when developing your marketing strategy. Because your competitors are most probably targeting the same audience, their strategies might work for you.
Check how they are doing and their top performing posts. That gives you a lot of ideas for not only your social media strategies but also your content creation.
The following are my proven tactics for competitor research on social media:
71. Pay attention to your competitor’s top performing posts
You and your competitor are in the same industry or share niche topics. So that analyzing their top performing posts gives ideas for your content marketing. Check what types of contents they are and if it’s promotional or not.
72. Check what kind of headlines your competitor is using
Source: Twitter – Social Media Today
From their posts that had a big impact, see what kind of headlines they are using. Check some points like their length, keywords, numbers, and types of headlines.
73. Locate which ones are your competitor’s core social channels
When you locate their social channels, you may see which ones they focus on across social networks. If you don’t get their strategies on platforms, then analyze which ones get more engagements.
74. Spy on your competitor’s hashtag strategies
Source: Social Insider
Not only taking notes of their hashtags but also what types of hashtags they use. Are they the most shared hashtags, your niche keywords, the related keywords, or their original hashtags? Check the hashtag popularity, the potential reach, and etc.
75. Uncover your competitor’s strategies for follower growth
You shouldn’t care about the number of followers so much on social media, but keep in mind that more followers, more chances to get your contents seen. Spy on how much is their follower growth within a certain period. It’s worth learning their strategies if the growth rate is higher than yours.
76. Check when they are posting
Observe when is their average posting time. If they are posting at a different time from yours, then they might target a different audience, or simply they don’t use the optimal time. Also, check how many engagements they got. If it looks good, try to post at their posting schedule and see the results. You may have a wrong audience targeting.
77. Discover how often your competitor updates on each platform
The frequency of social updates can increase the chances of more engagements. Rather than the posting time of a day pay attention to how often your competitor posts their new updates on each platform. If you update seldom and they post often, the reason why you don’t get engaged may be the frequency.
78. Understand your competitor’s strengths
Source: Neil Patel
Knowing what are your competitor’s strengths gives you many ideas about the competition. You can have two strategies for strengths. One is to create a better product or service to defeat them. Another is to admit you cannot win the game and invest in other strategies.
79. Analyze your competitor’s weaknesses
Your competitor’s weaknesses are a big chance to improve and grow your business. It’s not only identifying your strengths but also giving you some lessons. Beating their weak points helps you to take advantage and maximize the differentiation from them.
80. Define your competitive advantages
To stay ahead of the competition, you need to step up where your competitive advantages are. It can be branding differentiation, pricing, advanced technology, and more. Based on the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, find out what you can outperform.
81. Make sure to pick the successful ones for competitor research
Don’t take the competitor that you’ve already defeated for your competitor. To have an upward revision, you should choose a successful competitor that you haven’t won the competition with yet. So, you’ll find more areas to improve your business and aim for higher success.
82. Spot how your competitor offers social customer service
Social media customer service improves your customer support on social media. Check how fast your competitor responds and how they automate tasks using chatbots, and more. That gives lots of hints to improve yours.
Chapter 6
Social Media Platforms
Every social media platform has its own style and focus points. As you know not all social media platforms are suitable for your business.
Understanding which platforms impact your business helps you to improve your strategies efficiently.
Here are some tips you can use when you identify your target platforms:
83. Understand the advantages of each social media platform
Each social media has different ways of self-expression and has different functions to connect with users. Before choosing your target platforms you need to fully understand the benefits of each social network. The details of each major social media platform will help you to make the most of your efforts and grow your business.
84. Spot where your target audience is and connect with them
In audience research, you may find in which platforms your target audience is. But if you’re still looking for, there are many ways to locate them. From searching for the users using your niche hashtags to profile search on each platform. And of course, you can ask your customers about their use of social media.
85. Understand how active your target audience is on each channel
It’s meaningless to work on a social channel that your target audience is not spending time. Even when you find them on specific social networks, check how active they are. To determine your target channel, this process is vital.
86. Limit the number of social media platforms that you can handle
How many social media play forms can you handle? This “handle” means not just posting there, but also being actively interacting with users. Narrowing down your activity areas may limit the possibilities of your success, but it’s better than doing it with half done.
87. Test if your contents work for the social media platforms you chose
Once you choose your target platforms, all you need to do is testing. Do trial and error to find the best place to make your marketing strategies work.
88. Don’t make yourself do it for just work – ENJOY!
It’s hard to keep motivation up if you don’t like something. For example, if you don’t like to create a certain type of contents such as a video, you can discard the option of YouTube. Choose platforms that you can be a star content provider, and you and your audience will be able to enjoy together.
Chapter 7
Social Media Calendar
A social media marketing calendar is a powerful management tool that your team needs for achieving your goals in a specific period of time. It includes detailed information in every process from planning to social measurement.
You can use it to check your actions as well as a communication tool. If you’re new to the marketing calendar, here’s how to create and use your marketing calendar.
The following are my proven strategies for a social media marketing calendar.
89. Make your calendar as the hub of your team’s activities
Content Marketing Calendar by Evinex
Making your social media marketing calendar a core of your team’s activities avoids delay and procrastination. Moreover, it allows you to get everyone of your team on the same page.
90. Be clear and as specific as possible in your inputs
If you don’t add clear updates, your team members might misunderstand and this may cause repeating the same tasks. Make sure your texts are easy to understand but explain what you have done well. Attaching files can help you to prevent these problems.
91. Choose the right social media marketing calendar
The use of the right marketing calendar for you improves the team’s productivity. If your calendar is not enough to plan well and share with your team, then you need to customize it as you need. Make sure all the information that should be shared with the team is in the calendar.
92. Have someone to manage your calendar
Even all your team members check your calendar everyday, it’s good to assign someone who oversees it. The person should contact people when your plan isn’t carried out as planned and fire the team up.
93. Make it as customizable as possible
The ideal calendar is an editorial calendar. Whenever you need some changes, you should always be able to add rows and columns to make it more detailed. The printable calendar is useful for meetings and reports though.
94. Define who’s responsible for a certain task
If your team is small, it is easy to see who’s in charge of a certain task. But it is clearer if your team can check who’s assigned to a task in the calendar. So everyone knows who to contact to and where to get help.
95. Consider fun national holidays to engage with the audience
Especially social media, why not connect and engage with your audience in a fun way? The marketing calendar can include fun national holidays like National Deskfast Day. It helps you to share amusing moments with your audience.
96. Update the status every time you progress your tasks
When you start working on a task, you should put your status like “in progress.” If not, your team doesn’t know if you’re working on it or not. Also, it can prevent project delay from misreading and miscommunication.
97. Add all the filters to deliver your post effectively
Depending on the social media platforms, you may need more columns and rows in your calendar. Customize as much as you like to deliver your best contents.
98. Include all metrics for your strategies to track
It is effective to include all the metrics you use for your social media marketing strategies in your calendar. So it’s easy to track and see what types of your contents perform well and which platform is engaging more.
99. Set up your evaluation periods
Whether it’s monthly or quarterly, you should define your evaluation periods. With enough time to get results, evaluate your performance and make a report. This will help you to improve your efforts and invest in the right contents.
100. Plan with enough time to polish your contents
Be well-prepared in advance for your contents. Then you will have enough time to improve them and perform your best.
101. Be flexible for last minute changes
As I mentioned previously, planning in advance is vital but your contents should be timely. Like you cannot post sunny day’s activities on a rainy day. You should be always flexible and accept last minute changes.
102. Add your (estimated) milestones to achieve
You should keep in mind your milestones. It can be 20k followers acquisition or 10 years anniversary of online business. Showing your company or brand information creates a better understanding and closer relationships.
103. Always keep tracking your marketing calendar
Social Media Calendar by Evinex
From content creation to monitoring, keeping tracking of your marketing calendar leads you to success. You can find issues at an early stage and work on them immediately. Also, even you have evaluation period, you may see the areas of improvements during the monitoring.
104. Have a good balance between busy and no-plan days
Social media marketing calendar helps you to see a bigger picture of your activities. When adding your key dates on the calendar, try to have a nice balance between key dates and the others.
105. Use a good collaboration tool for team communication
Source: Slack App
If you use marketing calendar software, it might contain communication methods in it. But if not, leverage a team communication tool that is comfortable to use for your team and allows you to upload most of the files in the system.
106. Set priorities for your projects
It is crucial to set priorities and share them with your team. You know what projects have a bigger impact and which ones don’t. Depending on these factors you should set priorities to complete, just in case.
Chapter 8
Content Optimization
Following social media etiquette and being active on social media is essential. But what makes people want to keep engaging with you would be up to your contents.
If your content adds value to your audience, you can get more shares and engagements. The shareable contents catch users’ attention and grow your followers. To have a bigger impact on your post, you need to learn how to draw users’ attention and retain your followers.
I’m going to share some tactics that work:
107. Create unique and high-quality contents
Nobody wants to share low-quality and used contents. If you want your contents to be shareable on social media, creating unique and high-quality and unique contents is a must. Also now that Google places high-quality contents to the top of their SERPs, you don’t get traffic if you are not writing high-quality contents.
108. Craft long-form contents
Similarly, a long-form content tends to be more comprehensive and informative contents. It improves more engagement (more shares) and keeps users on your website longer. Besides, containing lots of information has more possibilities to get organic keywords and backlinks. That will help you to rank contents higher on search engines as well.
109. Conduct a content audit
A content audit is an analysis of all the contents on a website. It tells you what contents you already have and identifies what contents you should provide to your target audience. You can expand your content ideas for the future and see which contents need upgrades.
110. Share educational contents
One of the most shareable topics is educational content that answers the audience’s interests and curiosities. It helps you to attract and convert them, and retain the current followers. For example, a tutorial like a how-to post.
111. Improve your readability
Source: Hemingway App
Readability is critical to get your contents shareable. Making your contents easy for your audience to read and understand increases engagement. You can add subheadings and bullet point listings for scannability. Keep in mind to optimize for mobile. If you have long paragraphs, shorten the sentences and split them into several paragraphs.
112. Keep your target audience’s interests and problems in mind
The topics your target audience cares about increases the possibility they share on social media. They will enjoy the contents you provide answer to their pains and supportive contents for their interests.
113. Give actionable information
Actionable information is helpful for users to solve problems and take action. It addresses their needs and provides value. You can grab attention of your target audience by showing how to face their pains with detailed directions. Remember to match your contents to your target audience, or you won’t get any shares.
114. Make it visual and compelling
As you know, visual content performs better than texts only. It plays a very important role in the transmission of information, especially for long and professional articles. Some information is hard to describe without using images and videos. Using these visuals helps you to increase the level of understanding of your audience as well. Use tools that create images for social media wisely and catch your audience’s eyes.
115. Create informative infographics
People love to share infographics since they are eye-catching, informative, and persuasive. Infographic contains so much information but makes it easier to digest in one image. Thus, infographics is one of the best match to be shared on social media where you have a limit to deliver your messages.
116. Promote with video contents
by HubSpot Academy
It’s getting obvious that video contents enhance more engagement than any other visual contents. Video improves your conversion rates and user experience. More importantly, videos encourage social share. Make sure to use a compelling storytelling and match your target audience’s needs.
117. Pay special attention to feedback
Getting feedback on social media is easier than receiving it face-to-face. From social listening to social reviews, you can collect valuable feedback on social media. Like it or not, you may receive both positive and negative reviews and comments. These voices are valuable for your content creation as well as your overall marketing strategies. Listen to those feedback carefully and learn from them for providing better services.
118. Maximize your performance with hashtags
When you craft contents, think about the hashtags that support your contents to maximize your performance. Hashtag narrows down the audience by topics and makes it easier for your target audience to find your contents. I’m going to share some actionable tips in the next section.
119. Take advantage of your data and analysis
Tracking and analyzing your marketing performance is essential. But the most important thing is to put the data and analysis into action. Use the data from your content marketing to create better content and engage better with your audience.
120. Write click-worthy headlines
On social media, there’s not too much to say except that headlines determine the success of your post. As people on social media start scanning from headlines, you cannot even grab a user’s attention without catchy content titles. Take some time to craft click-worthy headlines .
121. Don’t forget to optimize with keywords
To boost social shares, you need to optimize your content with keywords to get it more consumable. Besides, each social network has its own search features that allow users to search by keywords. Thus, leveraging your keywords improves your online visibility and impacts your marketing results.
122. Don’t forget trends
When you create contents, you cannot ignore the trend forecast for the main keyword of your content. Use Google Trends to predict if your content will have enough search volume. If you don’t, you may use tons of time for content creation and gain nothing in return.
123. Recycle your old contents
Source: Evinex
Don’t you have old contents that still have backlinks but the information got outdated? These contents are great sources to give them fresh air and recycle. Content recycling adds value to the content and boost your SEO efforts. You can add the latest information and infographics. That gives you additional social shares.
124. Repurpose your existing contents
Likewise, content repurposing is one of the creative techniques to keep driving traffic to content. It gives another chance to get featured on your site and boost social shares to your contents. There are many ways to repurpose your existing contents . For example, you can use content syndication networks to get your content in front of a larger audience of other sites.
125. Make social sharing easier for users
Source: Evinex
Social sharing is an easy and quick way of spreading posts on social media. Making it easier for users to share your contents is critical. Your audience can share your contents from social networks but it is easier for them to do it from the content page. Set up your social share buttons on your website. Don’t miss the opportunity to get viral by other users.
126. Consider employee advocacy
Employee advocacy is a promotion of a brand through its employees. Involving your employees as advocates helps you to provide valuable insights for users and expand your brand reach. So in content creation, people can have more personal explanations of your products and services. Just keep in mind to prepare your guideline for the program, or you cannot control their contents and reviews.
127. Insert a call-to-action sentence
Adding the right CTA on social media post encourages users to take actions and increases the click-through rates. From leading users to a blog post to downloading a file, you must insert a CTA sentence to get results. Make sure to provide a clear benefits of the CTA for users.
128. Evoke users’ emotions
The key to successful contents is to trigger emotional responses from your audience. The top three most shared contents evoke emotions; awe, fun, and amusement. You can incorporate with storytelling, colors, and social proof to produce those emotions.
Chapter 9
Hashtags
A hashtag is like a link that draw users to the posts which use the same hashtag. It improves your social visibility, and drives social conversation and engagement.
But as you know, it doesn’t work as you think if you use wrong hashtags. For example, if you use very niche keywords, then few people will find you.
These are my winning formulas that you can take:
129. Understand the optimal number of the hashtag on each platform
Source: TrackMaven
Each platform has a preferable number of hashtags to use in a post. For example, a post with 1-2 hashtags gets more engagement on Twitter, while 9-11 hashtags on Instagram are optimal. Keep in mind the best number of hashtags for all social networks not to have a negative impact on users.
130. Narrow down audience by specific or niche hashtags
Using specific and niche hashtags helps you to deliver your content to the people who have real interests in the keywords. It means more qualified leads and allows for the pinpoint targeting. Like #localseotips is a more specific hashtag than #seo.
131. Mix generic hashtags with specific ones
But what if your niche target is too hard to reach your target audience? You can mix with a bit more generic but relevant hashtags so that your target audience can find your post and know your niche.
132. Make your hashtags short and memorable
When you do a hashtag campaign, you may want to create your own branded hashtags. If a hashtag is not common and complicated, the user has to type by himself and typo can happen. To prevent that, you should make your hashtags short and memorable.
133. Check hashtag trends and join
Source: Instagram
Trending hashtags are popular hashtags in current time and often work as a craze for a short period. Using these hashtags will help you to reach new leads and increase the opportunities to connect more with the audience than you could do. Check your chance to boost your reach and join whenever it’s appropriate for your business to join.
134. Find out your competitor’s hashtags
Check what hashtags your competitors are using and how well they are performing. If they are getting lots of traffic from hashtags, you may want to try their strategies for hashtags in your social media marketing.
135. List out your influencer’s hashtags
In addition to competitors, you should also consider the hashtags which the influencers of your industry use. Normally they have good hashtag strategies to reach a larger audience and you may get some solutions for your problems on social media.
136. Keep the related hashtags in mind
When you research your hashtags, check the related hashtags. If you want to use #marketing, you can check #digitalmarketing, #marketingtips, and more related hashtags. Depending on your hashtag’s performance, you can test these related hashtags and find which ones work for you.
137. Consider singular and plural versions of hashtags
It often happens that using singular or plural versions of the hashtag has a different performance such as popularities. There are 1.1M posts with #marketingstrategy compared with #marketingstrategies which has 76.4K posts. Research which one your target people use and add the version to your hashtag list.
138. Analyze your top performance post’s hashtags
When you analyze your top social media performance, check what hashtags you used. Maybe you have common hashtags in your top performed posts. Take notes of all the hashtags in these posts and get an overview of the hashtag performance from your hashtag analytics tools. Sometimes comparing them with the one you wanted to get more engagements may help you to find what the problems were.
139. Match your image and hashtags
Source: Instagram – Evinex
If your image and hashtags don’t match, people feel you’re spammy and you may lose trust. The best hashtag strategy is to never use irrelevant hashtags. For example, when you have several products and services and you post about one of them. Be careful not to use a set of your hashtags that are relating to your business, but not to the post.
140. Hide hashtags
As some people don’t include a set of hashtags in the caption, you can hide hashtags and add them in the comments. When people start commenting on your post, the caption will disappear and people can concentrate more on what you say in caption.
141. Measure the performance of hashtags
It is vital to measure the performance of your hashtags. Even you want to use a specific hashtag in your post, if nobody searches and uses your hashtag, your entire marketing efforts don’t get paid off. Always check if your hashtags impact on the performance of your posts.
142. Add location hashtags
Location hashtags allow you to connect and interact with the locals. Not just using broad hashtags, consider to combine your location to your hashtags. For example, if you want to post about food, you can add #lafoodie and #eaterla, instead of only using #foodie. This is the same technique as using specific hashtags to narrow down your audience.
143. Avoid putting hashtags near your main keywords
Some people mix hashtags in their plain text caption. But if you put hashtags near your main keywords, people may get confused about what is the core of your message. Moreover, it is hard to click a hashtag correctly. Consider how easy your hashtag can click in your caption if you want to emphasize.
144. Use hashtag analytics tools to find the best hashtags for you
Source: Hashtagify
Hashtag analytics tools make it easier for you to find the best hashtags and optimize your social media marketing. You can get in-depth insights into your hashtags and based on the analysis you can develop better hashtag strategies. If you’re new to hashtag analytics, here are great hashtag analytics tools that work in 2019 .
145. Don’t use the same hashtags repetitively
There are many reasons why you shouldn’t use the same hashtags repetitively. First, you will always get more or less the same results if the image is nice enough. If you want to spread your social posts, you should always test what’s working and try to find your best hashtags. Second, you may get shadowbanned by using repetitive hashtags.
Chapter 10
Scheduling and Publishing
Scheduling social media posts saves lots of time and energy for you. It also helps you to see a bigger map of your posting strategy and it makes it easier to modify if necessary.
Understanding the best time for your post to get a bigger reach is one of the key strategies. Applying this kind of a little trick polishes your social media performance.
The following are some tricks for when you schedule and post:
146. Post at peak traffic times
Researching when is your peak traffic time each day is key to successful social posting. Use your analytics tools and track your post-performance to define your best time to post. It will boost your reach and have high social ROIs. Be aware that traffic time varies everyday.
147. Apply the 80/20 rule
The 80/20 rule on social media is one of the social sharing techniques. 80% of your social media posts should be helpful to your audience, such as informative and educational contents. And the rest 20% can be promotional. Remember people don’t like pushy sales and limit your promotions to minimize negative feelings for your business.
148. Establish your publishing frequency for each platform
Consistent publishing is key to impact your traffic and SEO. Whether several times per day or a few times per week, you need to set your publishing frequency for each platform . Each social media platforms has a preferable frequency so be careful how often you post. Once you’ve defined your frequency, stick to the schedule.
149. Avoid posting the same contents across platforms
Not everyone follows you on all of your social networks, but some people connect with you through several channels. Don’t publish the same contents across platforms at the same time. These people will get to see the same posts everywhere and it makes them tired of seeing your posts. This increases the possibilities of choosing one platform and unfollowing you on the rest of the platforms.
150. Schedule an alert to tell key members when to publish
To respond quickly and interact with users, schedule alerts for your new posts for your key members along with your social scheduling. Make sure to set roles to people, like who responds to users on comments and messages. It helps you to avoid double-responses and manage feedback better and faster.
151. Reshare your evergreen contents
Source: Evinex
Not everyone sees every single post you’ve written and remembers. Resharing your evergreen contents increases the chances for your audience who hasn’t seen the posts to see them. Since evergreen contents are relevant and valuable to your audience over a long period, you can count on them when you schedule.
152. Consider the 5-3-2 rule
When you post on social media, keep the 5-3-2 rule in mind. It is a ratio to follow when you do social sharing. In every ten posts, you should share 5 posts from curation, 3 posts from your creation, and 2 posts from your humanized contents. Focus on your audience needs and don’t post too much about your business contents.
153. Find other’s shareable posts
Source: BuzzSumo
On Twitter sharing others’ posts that are valuable to your audience in your feed is another way of creating relationships and building your credibility. When you want to post something users will share, I recommend you to use Buzzsumo to find the most shared contents across the social networks. You can filter the content types, dates, and social channel to see more interesting posts to share your feed.
154. List out your favorite website to share
On the other hand, you can also list out or bookmark your favorite site that you normally share their contents. It will save your time to search for the curated contents. If you don’t have any, check your industry’s influencers.
155. Use a social media marketing calendar
As I mentioned before, a social media marketing calendar assists you to stick to the plan and publish consistently. You can use it for social media management, and a content calendar for content creation and track each content’s performance. It helps you to perform your best.
156. Leverage social media scheduling tools
Source: Later
Social media scheduling tools help you to schedule your social posts in advance and track your performance through the tool. These tools help you to post real-time contents, manage your social media activities, create in-depth reports, and more. Leverage social media scheduling tools to save time and put those hours to maximize your entire marketing efforts.
Chapter 11
Engagement Optimization
Encouraging social media engagement is extremely important for brands. It increases marketing communication with the audience and the interaction boosts your brand awareness and the reach.
However, to improve social media engagement you need to have a well-researched and crafted strategy. Without giving any initiatives to your audience in your social media posts, people don’t have any reasons to interact with you.
Here are my proven social media engagement strategies:
157. Communicate with users by personalized interactions
Personalization is one of the most effective strategies on social media to improve engagement. With personalized comments, you can create an emotional connection with your audience. Thus, they will feel more comfortable during the interaction.
Responding to all the comments differently will show users that you care about them and you’re responsive.
158. Ask questions and join the social conversation to answer
When a post includes a question, it is easier for users to engage with you. Even when your post is interesting for your audience but it doesn’t have a question, people may end up with a quick interaction such as like or send one emoji at best. Though, you should try to add a question or something that calls your audience to take action!
Vice versa, you can also join social conversation by answering questions of other users and commenting on the posts that are relevant to your industry and business. This can create an additional chance to enhance engagement.
159. Take advantage of emojis
Emoji is an eye-catching and powerful form in text-based content marketing. It helps to express your emotions and thoughts better and increases social media engagement.
Don’t overuse emojis, but use them with caution. The improper use of emojis can hurt your brand image and destroy authority. Make sure that your emojis make sense in the content.
160. Go for video content and live video
One of the most effective tools that drive user engagement on social media is video content. Video allows you to break things down to explain them in detail and it makes it easier for your audience to understand the topic.
Especially nowadays the consumption of video content on social media is on the rise. You can take advantage of the ongoing trend and enjoy the ride!
161. Reach out to your target users and talk to them directly
Another surefire way for social media engagement is to outreach your target users and interact with their posts. Whether it’s “like” or “comment,” if you take initial action, it will get easier for them to raise awareness and engage with you.
Of course, it will take a long time if you’re waiting for others to come along and motivate them to take action. Or the time will never come to you. So, take the lead in social conversation and engage with your target audience.
162. Use polls for a quick engagement
Social media polls are a quick and simple way to get your audience’s opinions and feedback. It allows you to collect user data, and boost engagement by encouraging users to join in your conversation. Make it interactive and relevant to your audience, so that they are more comfortable to answer.
163. Leverage interactive survey features
Just like polls in the previous tip, you should make use of interactive survey features on social media. These features can collect user information and feedback without making them feel troublesome but in a fun way.
For example, you can use a question sticker and a reaction slide bar on Instagram to get to know your audience. People can answer easily through the interactive survey features and it doesn’t require many like general surveys so that you don’t bother them at all.
164. Join some relevant groups and communities
The social media group and community you should care about are not only your authoritative ones. By joining relevant groups and communities of your industry and business, you can open up possibilities for more engagement.
Besides, you can find people who have a similar view or concern in those groups and communities. So, by engaging and building relationships with them, you can drive them into your content and create better engagement.
165. Focus on original visuals in your post
Using original images brings you more shares and engagements. One of the successful branding images is “behind the scene.” It shows your company’s personality and culture. This is a great way to connect with your audience and build trust. You can share your team-building scene, the progress of your work, and funny moments in the company.
166. Grow your follower base
You should think about quality over quantity as regards your followers. However, it is true that the more followers you have, the more engagement that can happen.
Try to grow your follower base considering the quality of your followers. By defining your market segment and targeting, you can find your target personas and connect to potential customers. Who knows, they could be your future customers!
167. Share user-generated content (UGC)
It is true that people trust more user-generated contents than the ones from brands. And UGC gets higher engagement rates on social media. Thus, sharing UGC helps you to get more support from users and create a strong connection with them.
168. Audit your audience’s social media engagement
One of the most important metrics on social media would be about engagement. You can measure the social media engagement by the user interactions such as likes, favorites, and shares. If you have high engagement, it means that your contents on social media are working well.
169. Find out how your competitors improve engagements
Dig into their social media marketing strategies. To drive more engagement, there are many ways. Such as interacting with users at real-time, creating video contents, and more. These findings can help you.
Chapter 12
Business Promotion
Promotion is one of the most important processes in social media marketing. It helps your content to go viral and improves the reach. Don’t forget engagement is the key to success in social media marketing.
There is much social promotion you can use from cross-promote to social media contest. You should choose the promotion type depending on your platforms. Keep your goals in mind to correct the course in each phase.
Here’s a list of promotion tips on social media:
170. Cross-promote across the platforms
Cross-promotion is a marketing technique that leverages other channels to promote a product or service. It expands your reach and increases the chances of conversions. By including other social media platforms
171. Provide social proof
Source: Evinex
Social proof is one of the most beneficial marketing techniques to build credibility and trust. Like when you are online shopping and see that your friends like a brand, you’re more likely to trust their products. Social reviews and testimonials are very effective to use when you need conversions.
172. Create videos to showcase your products/services
It’s efficient to showcase your products or services using a video. It’s eye-catching enough to grab people’s attention. It shows you an overview of your offers and normally converts better than texts or other contents. Remember to make your first three seconds interesting.
173. Do social media outreach
Social media outreach is a marketing approach to outreach and connect with your target audience through social media. It aims a brand to build one-to-one relationships with them. You can follow and interact, then send messages through comments and DMs.
174. Promote in your social media community
If you have your own social media community, promoting your marketing messages in the community is one of the best ways to get people to hear your story. Since your community is where people who are interested in your business, it has a higher level of understanding and converts well.
175. Don’t be afraid to give spotlights to content multiple times
How many times do you promote your content in a day? Did you get enough results? If not, don’t be afraid to promote it multiple times. You can publish it from different channels at a different time. Make sure to change the featured image on social media and captions if you want to post it from the same channel once again.
176. Add tags of your products into your post
Tagging your products in your post helps you to provide a better user experience. It gives people its information quickly and shortens the conversion process. By using product tags, people don’t need to look for the products from search engines or websites, they can check directly from its product page.
177. Get your employee involved
Employees are your best brand ambassadors. As I mentioned about employee advocacy in content creation, you should involve your employees in promotion as well. It helps you to get a bigger reach and have more chances to engage. In my experience, employee’s posts have a higher conversion rate. Why not encourage your employees to promote the company’s contents?
178. Consider content share community
Source: Reddit
Have you ever used Reddit or other republishing community? Sometimes promoting your contents on social media is not enough to increase your traffic. A content share community can help you to share your contents to a larger audience and increase social shares from the site.
179. Offer deals or promotion codes on your target channels
A great way to boost sales on social media is to offer special deals like promo codes and coupons. Create a specific condition for the deals to increase both the social media fan base and the sales. Such as, ask people to follow you or comment on your post to get your social media deals. It’s easy to imagine this for product providers. If you sell services, you can give a limited-time free trial of your specific service, for example.
180. Run a social media contest
A social media contest is one of the most cost-effective and powerful social promotions. It increases your exposure efficiently, foster interactivity with users in a fun way, and grows your business fan base.
181. Conduct a giveaway
Source: EasyPromos
A popular social media marketing promotion is giveaways. You give something away for free to increase brand awareness and chances to sell your full-services. It can be a great opportunity to let people know about your products and services. When they like yours, they may be your life-time customers.
182. Plan sweepstakes
Sweepstakes is another popular way to attract followers to have a chance to win a prize. Offer something desirable like your latest or most popular products. Usually, the entry for sweepstakes is free, but it requires some information like names and email addresses in return. You can increase your social exposure and build your contacts list fast.
183. Use referral promotion
Referral promotion is designed for a compa