50 Social Media Tips

Brainstorming is a great way to come up with the best ideas (and understanding that some ideas aren’t going to make the cut). This is a massive list of our practical tips for Social Media. Developed in conjunction with our course, Super Social Media, it is a mix of advice and best practices to boost your social media activity.

1. The only way to get anywhere is by knowing where you are now. Audit your social media accounts often. If it can’t be done once a month, aim for a quarterly report. 
2. Have strong mission, vision, and values statements and make them available to your clientele. Although it’s not specifically about social media, it’s important to emphasize, so you can pay attention to it. Everything you present online should follow a strategic plan that is based on your mission, vision, and values. Every action you take, and every detail should go back to your strategy. This includes your posts, hashtags, tags, following, approach, copies, etc.
3. Keep track of social media trends, memes, virals, and news. They might be useful for bringing attention and catching momentum if they resonate with your brand/product.
4. As simple and obvious as it sounds, make sure there are no grammar or spelling mistakes before posting. I can’t stress this enough. People make mistakes, but these are preventable.
5. Know your audience. Build a target profile based on marketing research. Know their demographics (age, gender, income, nationality, family size), geographic characteristics, job specifics, income, personality, behaviours. This will help you identify and build a strategy that will resonate with your audience.
6. Study. Knowing history is key. Before presenting your content to your audience, make sure it’s unique and hasn’t already been done. Customers pick that up right away, and months of work and planning can go to waste in minutes.
7. Keep your competitors close. Be aware of your competitor’s moves and style. You can find a gap in the market that hasn’t been filled yet. 
8. Use hashtags that matter. Find the balance between related trending hashtags and original ones. It will keep your work relevant and personal.
9. Keep it real. Consumers can smell when something is ‘cooked’, and things can backfire. Presenting a real history brings communities together, attention to your business, customer interest, meaning, and value.
10. Be consistent. Schedule your posts in advance according to your marketing strategy. Consumers will remember and feel your business’s media presence. 
11. Always answer and address consumer’s concerns. Replies, likes (back), and retweets are basically a chance to improve, or earned media, which can be used as content if done successfully.
12. Know how to use new features. From time to time, there’s an update on apps such as IG or FB that provides a new feature that you can use as a tool to bring your customers even closer. Things such as Gifts, Countdowns, “Ask me’ questions, inviting a viewer during a live session to a video call, etc.
13. Search for references. Look up accounts that inspire you and your business to become greater. Never duplicate someone else’s work, but you can repost and/or tag posts/tweets that you find relevant and might serve as an inspiration to other people, too. By doing that you build credibility and connections.
14. Don’t be afraid. What you’re selling doesn’t have to be pretty or visually appealing for you to expose it to your social media accounts. A platform should focus on your company/products’ essence before anything else. Presenting quality elements that you can offer your customers so they can visualize the benefits is more important than frequently presenting visuals of your product to them.
15. Understand the meaning of Paid, Owned and Earned media. Knowing this will give you the power to plan and balance your content amongst those, including decisions regarding the efforts involved to make those happen.
16. Plan to have giveaways/promotions/draws within your strategic plan if it’s something that resonates with your product/company. It catches attention, creates a buzz, and it becomes “virtual” word-of-mouth through tagging and following.
17. The products/services you sell can be arranged into collections/lines. That makes it more organized, visually clean and simple, and easier for customers to understand, absorb, and purchase.
18. Think beyond sales. Although ROI is important, it’s not the most important aspect of social media. Try to see beyond the financial line. Pushing yourself to think ahead will bring long-term realizations that will only be possible if you invest today. Some things can only be built over time.
19. Have a clean, easy to access, and updated profile with links available, so your customers can reach you at any time. Link on bio, Contact us, etc.
20. Write effective CTAs (Call to action). They are prompts that drive your clients to purchase, sign up, or download, amongst others. Effective CTAs will bring you more clicks, more buys, more sign-ups and more engagement.
21. Sell it. Don’t be afraid to use words such as Buy, Call, or Sign up. Customers are expecting a real place to take action and get what they want. 
22. Time is of the essence. When dealing with a CTA, it’s important to create a sense of urgency. Otherwise, customers might miss a deal, promotion, discount, or something that is being offered. 
23. Customize CTAs based on different platforms. Each one should have specific features because they work differently.
24. Give a sense of limited or restricted time and material, but be real about it. Consumers respond faster when they know products go out of stock, collections are seasonal, and goods won’t be available forever.
25. Play a little. Pay attention to your posts and consumers’ reactions, change something and try again to see if they respond any different. Don’t be afraid to have a little fun while finding out more about your audience. You can do that by changing a layout design or colour, or even just a font.

26. Set Google alerts to monitor your personal and company’s name, the industry, events, competitors, or anything that you find relevant to your business.
27. Update your business information from time to time and if there’s a major or fast change, do it promptly. 
28. Reply fast. In this day and age, everything happens so fast, and you can feel a sense of immediacy everywhere. Try your best to assist your clients’ requests right away, and make sure they are pleased with your response.
29. Think of HOW instead of WHAT to sell. Focus on the way you should do it, instead of concentrating all your efforts into building and presenting something new to your target market. Sometimes the answer lies in the way you conduct/present your business rather than what you offer.
30. Don’t be afraid to apologize in case you make a mistake. Realizing you made a mistake, and making it right is appreciated and also viewed as human. Of course, it depends on the gravity of the problem, but focusing on righting your wrongs and learning from them is already an honourable step.
31. Find the best times for you to post during the day on each platform by using research and collecting data. Every platform responds differently. 
32. Find your way out of the clutter. A good tip is to use backlinks to build traffic. Backlinks are when it’s possible for you to access an additional fragment of content through a direct link URL.
33. Establish authentic connections with your prospects instead of annoying or alienating them. There’s no way around this; you need to care about your audience in order for them to feel connected to you. It takes time, but that’s the business value vertex.
34. When going live on social media, make sure you have thought of every detail possible around you, so you minimize the possibility of a mistake/problem. Set up good lighting, a tripod, someone to help you in case you need it, leave notes or cheatsheets available in case you go blank.
35. If you’re planning on introducing a new product, consider contests. Contests are fun, interactive, and competitive. They encourage trial, which encourages sales. This is a maneuver for well-established accounts – meaning there are a number of participants and followers to partake in this – so if you don’t think you’re there yet with your social media audience, don’t discard it just yet, keep it in the back of your mind so you put it into action later on.
36. Hootsuite said it best, “Create a branded hashtag for Instagram aligned with community values”. Besides related popular hashtags, create your own but make sure it’s short, simple, clear, and easy to remember. It will bring communities together around the same interests, adding value to your business.
37. If you have a Twitter account, run or take part in Twitter chats. They are lively conversations around a determined hashtag, and it’s a great way to build community and address customer’s enquiries.
38. Social media accounts are primarily about the relationship, not the sale. Remember that when planning your material. Around 80% of your posts should be relevant content, and 20% should be about offers and sales. Be useful and reliable. This way you build awareness, interest and generate engagement first, so they can pursue and finalize purchases after. Sales funnel.
39. Join forces. If it’s a possibility, look for other businesses that you trust and respect in order to build partnerships and cooperations. Two businesses joining forces may bring more people than one could on their own, and will definitely raise awareness.
40. Understand your KPIs (Key Performance Indicator). KPI is the metric you choose to measure how well your content is doing compared to your predictions. You can do that by measuring the number of visitors from a social media post, organic traffic (search engine result links), submissions, etc.
41. If you’re having a draw, contest or giveaway on Twitter, make sure you Pin the tweet that everyone needs to click on instead of making them scroll down and look for it. It saves time and stress for everyone.
42. If you’re having a draw, contest, or giveaway on Instagram, post it on stories, and then highlight it so it’s available for everyone. Don’t forget to include the link so viewers can swipe up and go straight to the right place. If it’s a post and not a link, just go to your post, click on the “airplane” emoji, and then select “Add post to your story”, and there you have it.
43. Use the “Add post to your story” to beat the algorithm, and give your followers a new chance to view your posts in case they haven’t seen them in their feed. It’s a good reminder. You can also post a clickable emoji or gif, bringing curiosity and by clicking, viewers will go to your post.
44. Ask your followers to click on “Turn On Post notifications” for them to see what you post daily. This is also a great way to get away from the clutter.
45. Produce short and simple copies. When you choose a picture on Facebook or Instagram, you have more than 140 characters to write. That doesn’t mean you should always use all the space. Try to make smart, clean and direct statements when you’re posting. Remember that viewers are scrolling down impatiently, so strive for success.
46. Have fun, and stay creative. People love to see funny posts, so every once in a while, shoot for a funny post. Even better if it relates to your company or product. Spend time feeding your creativity, so your ideas can help your business have their own voice.
47. No clickbait. In the summer of 2017, Facebook announced changes in its algorithm to reduce clickbait content. Headlines that withhold information or exaggerate with sensational language will appear lower in the news feed. Therefore, focus on intelligent, appealing headlines with no extravagant, eye-popping expressions.
48. According to statistics, on average we spend 19 minutes a day reading, and 30 minutes watching videos. Think about that when developing conspicuous content. Would it work in a video format? If so, go ahead and do it. Make sure it’s plainspoken, engaging, well-edited, and not too extensive.
49. Don’t be afraid to show the making of’s. Viewers are into what happens backstage. Even if you are (photo)shooting a campaign that will launch in 3 months, try to find angles and portions of time to include your followers. It gives them something to wait for and adds curiosity and excitement. Stories are the perfect feature for this.
50. Allow your followers to send you a message while/after watching your stories using the “Leave message” feature. This way you can interact with them, answer to their questions and doubts, even direct them to your website.

For more Social Media Tips, check out our list of 10 social media tips for business that you can implement now.