20 Social Media Marketing Tips To Level Up Your Brand

Looking for social media marketing tips? I’ve got you covered.

Social media marketing (SMM) is the process of using social networks to promote your brand and sell more products or services.

In this post, I’ll share 20 expert social media tips to help you put together a successful social media marketing plan this year.

1. Set clear goals

All good social media marketing campaigns start with setting clear goals. 

You’ll build your entire social media marketing strategy around these goals. They’ll influence everything from the kind of content you create to the metrics you track, how you engage with your audience, and more.

Start by deciding what your overarching goals are—ask yourself what it is you’re trying to achieve. Here are some common examples:

• Increase brand awareness
• Drive website traffic
• Generate leads and sales
• Improve social customer care
• Grow our social following
• Improve our social return on ad spend (ROAS)

Once you’ve decided what your overall goals are, make them more specific and measurable. 

For example, instead of ‘grow our social following’, your goal could be to ‘reach 100,000 social media followers by the end of the quarter’. 

Instead of ‘drive website traffic’, your goal could be ‘drive 5,000 landing page visits from Facebook per month’. You get the idea.

2. Establish your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your KPIs are the metrics you’ll track to evaluate the impact of your social media marketing efforts.

It’s important to be clear on these from the get-go as taking a data-driven approach to social media marketing is the key to success.

Your KPIs should align with your social media goals.

For example, if your primary goal is to increase brand awareness, your KPIs might include post reach/impressions, video views, brand mention volume, social share of voice, etc.

If your goal is to improve your social customer care, your KPIs might include average response time, response rate, brand sentiment, etc.

And if your goal is to drive sales, your KPIs might include clicks, click-through rate (CTR), website visits, leads, sales, etc. 

I’d recommend using a dedicated social media analytics tool like Social Status to track your KPIs. 

Tools like this give you deeper insights that go beyond the basic metrics you get with the native analytics offered by social media platforms.

3. Focus on the right platforms

There are dozens of social media platforms out there. 

If you try to go wide and market your brand on all of them, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin. 

If you’re a big brand with a large social media team and plenty of resources, you might be able to manage it. 

But most of the time, it’s going to be a better idea to focus the bulk of your efforts on just one or two social media marketing platforms that are likely to drive the best results.

Which platforms should you focus on? That will differ from business to business. It all depends on who your target audience is and your content style.

For example, if you’re marketing a B2B brand that sells consultancy services to other businesses, then you’ll probably want to focus on LinkedIn as that’s where your target customers are.

Whereas, if you’re an ecommerce brand selling trendy drinkware or home decor products, platforms like Instagram or Pinterest might be more effective as these platforms excel at showcasing visually engaging content and cater more to audiences who are inspired by aesthetics and trends.

For brands targeting younger audiences, TikTok might be a good fit given its popularity among Gen Z users. On the other hand, if you’re in a space that relies on video content to educate or entertain, YouTube might be your go-to.

Start by analyzing your audience demographics, studying platform usage statistics, and experimenting with a few different social media channels to see which one yields the best results. Then, stick with them.

Bonus tip: Don’t forget to consider emerging niche platforms like Threads and Bluesky. While the user base on these platforms is smaller given how new they are, they’re also much less saturated with competition so it could be easier to cut through the noise and grow.

4. Establish your brand’s social voice

Your brand voice is the tone, style, and personality you convey across all your social media content.

Establishing a strong and consistent brand voice will help to make your marketing messages more effective. It can ‘humanize’ your brand, build trust, and make you more memorable.

Your voice should align with your brand identity and values. So, start by thinking about what you stand for and how you want to be perceived by your customers.

For example, do you want to come across as professional and polished? Fun and quirky? Warm and empathetic? 

To ensure consistency, create some brand voice guidelines to guide yourself and your team. This should include a list of dos and don’ts when caption writing, as well as examples of preferred phrases, emojis, etc. Share your guidelines with your team to keep everyone on the same page.

Bonus tip: Don’t be afraid to go bold when it comes to your brand voice. Drop the buttoned-up approach and experiment with more creative, distinct voices to stand out from the crowd. 

5. Plan your content strategy

Social media marketing is driven by content. 

You’ll need to consistently post high-quality, engaging social media content to grow your social media presence, generate engagement, and promote your business.

It helps to have a formal content strategy in place. This should outline what kind of posts you’ll create and how often you’ll post them.

You’ll need to consider your goals, audience, and other factors when putting together your content strategy.

For example, if you’re a B2B business and your target audience is industry professionals, you might share a lot of blog post links, curated news stories, opinion posts, etc.

On the other hand, if you’re an ecommerce business, you’re probably going to want to share a lot of product shots, UGC posts, reviews & testimonials, etc.

Remember that people don’t follow you on social media to see ads—they follow you to get value. 

As such, the bulk of your posts shouldn’t be promotional—they should be engaging. You need to bring value to the table. That might be entertainment value or useful information.

I’d recommend sticking to the 80/20 rule here. Only 20% of your posts should be promoting your products or services. The other 80% should be genuinely entertaining or informative posts that offer real value to your audience.

Bonus tip: In most cases, short-form video should be a big part of your social media content strategy. Social media users now spend the bulk of their time consuming short-form video and it’s the most engaging content format on many platforms.

6. Schedule posts in advance to save time 

Social media marketing is a lot of work. You’re juggling a lot of tasks and often have to share posts several times a day, to multiple platforms.

Scheduling your posts in advance using a social media scheduler like SocialBee helps you to keep things organized and ensures consistency. Plus, it saves you a ton of time.

Instead of creating and sharing posts manually one at a time, you can schedule a week, month, or even year’s worth of posts in one sitting—the tool will auto-publish each of them for you at the time/date you set.

You’ll be able to post to all your accounts across multiple networks from one unified content calendar. 

And there are built-in time-saving features like design integrations, AI caption/image generation, hashtag suggestions, evergreen content recycling, etc. to make your job even easier.

7. Find your best time to post

Sharing social media posts when your audience is most active helps to improve their performance and ensure maximum reach and engagement.

The hard part is figuring out when your audience is most active.

Fortunately, tools like SocialBee can help with this too. It can automatically calculate your personal best time to post based on your historical performance data.

In other words, it looks at how many views, likes, comments, etc. your previous posts have earned, and when they were posted. 

Then, it uses this to work out which posting times tend to lead to better results. It then recommends these ‘suggested posting times’ to you as you schedule. Pretty neat, huh?

8. Organize posts into categories to ensure a balanced content mix

With SocialBee, you can bucket social media posts together into content categories.

For example, you might have a ‘memes’ category, a ‘promotional posts’ category, a ‘UGC’ category, and so on. 

This is helpful for ensuring you have a balanced mix of different types of content.

You can fill each category out with a pipeline of posts. Then, set up a recurring, category-based posting schedule. This is a lot more efficient than scheduling posts individually one by one.

For example, let’s say you know you want to share a promotional post advertising your product every Wednesday at 5 PM.

You can create a weekly posting slot for Wednesday at 5 PM and schedule the ‘promotional posts’ category to that time slot. SocialBee will then automatically share one post from that category pipeline every week at that time. 

9. Curate and share UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is content created by other people that you use as part of your social media marketing campaigns.

It can include things like photos of customers using your products, reviews, testimonials, stories, etc.

It’s worth sharing UGC as part of your social media content mix for a few reasons.

First off, UGC feels more genuine than branded content, which helps boost your authenticity and makes your brand more relatable to your audience.

Secondly, it serves as powerful social proof that can help you to attract more customers.

And thirdly, sharing content created by your social media followers is a great way to build your community. It shows your audience that you care about what they have to say.

A good way to collect UGC is to run a branded hashtag campaign. Challenge your followers to share their experiences with your business using a branded hashtag. 

For example, if you’re marketing a footwear brand, ask them to share their best snap of them wearing your kicks out in the wild.

10. Don’t be afraid to use AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come on leaps and bounds over the last few years. It’s now an essential tool for social media marketing

And if you aren’t leveraging it yet, you might be missing out—because chances are, your competitors already are.

AI can significantly speed up and enhance your social media efforts by automating repetitive tasks and unlocking creative possibilities. Here are just a few ways you can use AI in your strategy:

• Generate post captions and images. Use AI tools to create catchy captions and visually appealing post images in seconds based on your prompts.
• Edit and subtitle videos. Save time by automating video editing and adding accurate subtitles to your social video content.
• Brainstorm content ideas. When you’re struggling to come up with new post ideas, let AI assist by generating fresh and innovative post concepts for you.
• Analyze audience insights. Use AI-powered analytics tools to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and gather insights to optimize your strategy.
• Automate engagement. Use AI tools to automatically reply to social media comments, DMs, etc.

While AI can be a game-changer, it’s important not to rely on it entirely. Authenticity and a human touch remain crucial for building trust and fostering genuine connections with your audience. 

Use AI to streamline your workflow but balance it with your own creativity.

11. Capitalize on social media trends

Social media thrives on trends. Every week brings a new wave of trending sounds, challenges, meme formats, and viral content.

These trends dominate feeds and often dictate what’s going to get the most likes, shares, and comments.

Posts that tap into current trends tend to achieve higher reach and engagement, making ‘trendjacking’ a powerful tool for social media marketers. By piggybacking the hype, you can position your brand at the center of the conversation.

Here’s how to effectively leverage social media trends:

• Stay informed. Keep an eye on trending hashtags, sounds, topics, and formats across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.
• Act fast. Trends often have a short lifespan. You don’t want to be late to the party, so get involved quickly to stay relevant.
• Adapt trends to your brand. Make the trend your own by tailoring it to fit your brand voice, values, and audience.

Remember, not every trend will align with your brand values or audience. Choose trends that make sense for your business. If it isn’t a good fit, don’t force it.

12. Practice engagement baiting

Most social media algorithms look at engagement signals to figure out whether a given post deserves to be seen by more people.

If your post gets a ton of likes, comments, shares, etc., the algorithm is more likely to increase its visibility so it shows up on the feeds of more users and gets more impressions.

This is where engagement baiting comes in. The idea is to craft posts that actively encourage interaction from your followers, thus boosting engagement and reach.

One of the best ways to draw out comments and spark engagement is by asking questions. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

• Ask open-ended questions. Share posts that ask something that encourages detailed responses. For example, ‘What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?’
• Ask polarizing ‘this-or-that’ questions. For example, ‘Dogs or cats?’, ‘Cream first or Jam first on a scone?’, ‘Pancakes or waffles?’ etc. These kinds of polarizing questions tend to spark debates in the comment section, leading to back-and-forth interactions and tons of comments.
• Prompt storytelling. Encourage your audience to share their personal experiences. For example, ‘Tell us about a time when you overcame a big challenge.’
• Encourage reactions to content. Post a meme, quote, or image and ask followers what they think or how they relate to it.

13. Run social media contests & giveaways

Try running contests and giveaways on social media to market your brand.

You can use a tool like SweepWidget to set one up in minutes.

First, choose a prize. This should be something your target audience will want, like a free bundle of your best products.

Then, set your entry requirements. These should align with your social media marketing goals.

For example, if your goal is to grow your social following, you might require users to follow your Facebook page or Instagram account to enter. Remember that you can add multiple entry requirements if needed.

After that, launch your contest and share the widget on your socials to promote it and encourage people to enter.

Bonus tip: Refer-a-friend contests often perform well on social media. Users have to share the post with a friend (such as by tagging them in the content) to enter, and this helps boost the contest’s reach and virality.

14. Reply to comments and messages

Social media marketing isn’t just about the posts you share. 

Posts can help you to grow your audience, but you also need to engage with your audience to build your community.

One way to do that is to reply to as many comments and messages as possible. 

Not only does this help to strengthen your community, but it can also drive engagement by encouraging further interactions.

I’d recommend using a social media inbox tool like Vista Social to help with this. 

It can pull all your incoming DMs and comments from across networks into one unified inbox, making it easier to manage and reply to them at scale. There are also time-saving features like saved replies, auto-moderation, etc.

15. Proactively engage with potential customers

We’ve covered why it’s important to reply to inbound engagements, but don’t just respond to people who interact with your brand on social.

Be proactive about it and also conduct outbound engagements to initiate conversations with your target followers/customers and get them interested in your brand.

A good way to go about this is to strategically ‘hijack’ the comment section of viral posts in your niche by leaving a comment. This can help to boost your visibility and allows you to tap into new communities. 

You could also try following the people who follow your biggest social media competitors or sending outbound DMs to your target audience/customers.

If you initiate conversations with 300 potential customers on social media a day, and just 5% of those convert to sales opportunities, that’s still 15 new customers a day. That’s the cheapest advertising you’ll ever get.

16. Use social listening to create new marketing opportunities

Social listening tools can help you to uncover new marketing opportunities for your brand.

For example, Brand24 can monitor social media for mentions of your brand name, competitor brand names, or any other keyword that’s important to you.

It pulls all those mentions into one feed so you can quickly jump into the conversation and capitalize on any marketing opportunities you identify.

For example, let’s say you’re marketing a dog toy brand that sells durable dog toys. 

You could set up a mention alert for ‘dog toy’ to see all the conversations happening on social media that include that keyword.

You might see a post that says something like ‘Why does my dog instantly destroy every dog toy I buy him? 🙁‘ in your Brand24 feed.

You can then leave a reply to that user saying something like ‘Hey [user] – we understand! That’s why we designed a range of indestructible dog toys for tough chewers’.

Another idea is to set up a mention alert for your competitor’s brand name. If you see someone complaining about their product/service, you can then reach out to offer your brand as an alternative. 

17. Sneak more marketing links into your bio 

You might want to promote more than one thing in your social media marketing campaigns.

For example, you might want to drive traffic to multiple websites, product pages, or landing pages.

Unfortunately, on platforms like Instagram, you can’t add links to regular feed posts. And you can only include one link in your bio, which makes this difficult.

As a workaround, you can use a link in bio tool like Shorby.

It lets you create a mobile landing page to house all your promotional links and gives you a short URL for that landing page to add to your bio.

18. Run social media ads for faster results

While organic strategies are essential for long-term growth, sometimes you need quicker results—and that’s where paid social media ads come in.

Platforms like Meta Ads (for Facebook and Instagram), TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and others offer powerful advertising tools that let you reach highly targeted audiences. 

You can run ads to promote your posts, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, or even boost sales, all within a short timeframe.

The key to success with social media ads is precise targeting. Use features like demographic filters, interest-based targeting, and custom audiences to ensure your ads reach the right people and deliver maximum ROAS (return on ad spend). 

It’s also important to write impactful copy and include a clear, compelling CTA in your ads. A/B testing your ad creatives and copy can also help you optimize performance over time.

19. Partner with influencers, creators, and brands in your niche

Partnering with others in your niche can help boost the reach of your social media marketing messages.

The most straightforward form of this is influencer marketing, where you pay a popular creator in your space for a sponsored post that promotes your business.

These days though, the influencer marketing space is a little saturated. A lot of influencers have fake followers and poor content, which you’ll want to avoid.

It can sometimes be more effective to target smaller, micro-influencers with as little as 10k followers. 

Accounts of this size tend to have a stronger relationship with their followers and haven’t spammed them as much with sponsored posts, which can make them more effective. Plus, they’re cheaper to work with, so you can often get a better ROI.

Another approach is to collaborate with other brands or creators in your niche for mutual benefit. 

For example, you could cross-promote each other’s content, co-host a giveaway, or team up for a live event. These partnerships can feel more authentic to your audience and deliver great results without the need for paid sponsorships.

20. Regularly analyze your performance and adapt

Last, but not least, remember to regularly review your analytics to evaluate your strategy and use the insights you gain to adapt your approach going forward.

Keep a close eye on your KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure how you’re performing towards your goals. You might even want to benchmark your performance against your competitors to compare things like your average engagement rate, follower growth, etc.

Review your post metrics to see which types of content and posting times tend to perform better, and which tend to perform worse. Then, feed that back into your strategy and change your content mix and schedule as needed.

As I mentioned earlier, I’d recommend using a dedicated analytics tool like Social Status for this as they offer more depth than native social media analytics.

Final thoughts

There you have it—20 social media marketing tips to guide your social media strategy this year.

The key to success is consistency. 

Post regularly, engage authentically, and experiment with new ideas to see what resonates best with your followers. Learn from your results and continually refine your strategy based on what’s working.

And remember that social media marketing is constantly evolving. While these tips can help you to achieve better results, staying ahead will require creativity and adaptability. Don’t be afraid to embrace new trends and adapt your strategy as the social landscape changes.